Belonging to People and Environments: Connecting Social Identities to Places in J. M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911) and Muhammad Farid Abu Hadid’s Karim Eldin Elbaghdady (1948)

This research paper examines the influence of a person’s sense of belonging to a group as well as to a place over two children’s novels: James Matthew Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911), and Muhammad Farid Abu Hadid’s Karim Eldin Elbaghdady (1948). The analysis of the two novels is based on an intellectual framework that links Henri Tajfel’s social identity theory and Harold M. Proshansky’s spatial identity theory. The study argues whether or not a person’s sense of belonging is bound to a place or a person’s in-groups, stressing the importance of both kinds of identities in the formation of children’s personal identities. Thus, the research adopts a descriptive-comparative approach to achieve its goal to achieve its goal of analyzing the place and community identities as portrayed in the two novels.. The first literary work analysed, Peter and Wendy, shows that Peter Pan chooses to let go of his group for the sake of staying in the Never Land alone. Karim Eldin Elbaghdady is different as the protagonist, Karim, belongs to wherever his in-groups are. Once he is left alone, he starts looking for other places where he can find other in-groups to belong to. Both protagonists are the main focus in this analysis as children are expected to perceive them as heroes, imitate them, and learn from their mistakes. The research concludes that in both novels in-groups are the main directors of a person’s sense of belongingness to a place, stressing how the protagonists’ mistakes lead to their loneliness and place aversion by the end of the two novels.