Digital Object Identifier
Drawing on Glynis Breakwell’s Identity Process Theory (IPT), this article reads Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears as a study of immigrant selfhood under pressure. Situated within a transnational lens, the novel shows how African immigrant identity in U.S. metropolitan space is continually negotiated through displacement, racialization and economic precarity, conditions that intensify identity threat. The protagonist, Sepha Stephanos, confronts recurring pressures and develops everyday coping practices to sustain selfhood amidst a state of flux. Contextualizing transnational simultaneity through Breakwell’s Identity Process Theory, this article reframes Sepha’s ordinary actions as forms of existential negotiation of identity operating across intrapsychic, interpersonal and intergroup levels. It further demonstrates that coping strategies which protect identity in the short term may also narrow social horizons and deepen isolation over time.
Mascarenhas Jennifer Joseph, and Dr. Miruna George. “Processing Identity as Existential Quest in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears..” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 2, Apr. 2026, pp. 332–345. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n2.20.
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