Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature
Author: Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2014-09-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317818210

This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature
Author: Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2014-09-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317818202

This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the Transatlantic, Asian American, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement - political exile, war trauma, and economic migration - the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are in-process and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and inter-subjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity.

Impossible Returns

Impossible Returns
Author: Iraida H. Lopez
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2018-03-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813063434

In this one-of-a-kind volume, Iraida López explores various narratives of return by those who left Cuba as children or adolescents. Including memoirs, semi-autobiographical fiction, and visual arts, many of these accounts feature a physical arrival on the island while others depict a metaphorical or vicarious experience by means of fictional characters or childhood reminiscences. As two-way migration increases in the post-Cold War period, many of these narratives put to the test the boundaries of national identity. Through a critical reading of works by Cuban American artists and writers like María Brito, Ruth Behar, Carlos Eire, Cristina García, Ana Mendieta, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Ernesto Pujol, Achy Obejas, and Ana Menéndez, López highlights the affective ties as well as the tensions underlying the relationship between returning subjects and their native country. Impossible Returns also looks at how Cubans still living on the island depict returning émigrés in their own narratives, addressing works by Jesús Díaz, Humberto Solás, Carlos Acosta, Nancy Alonso, Leonardo Padura, and others. Blurring the lines between disciplines and geographic borders, this book underscores the centrality of Cuba for its diaspora and bears implications for other countries with widespread populations in exile.

Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature

Gender and the Self in Latin American Literature
Author: Emma Staniland
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2015-10-05
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1134615043

This book explores six texts from across Spanish America in which the coming-of-age story ('Bildungsroman') offers a critique of gendered selfhood as experienced in the region’s socio-cultural contexts. Looking at a range of novels from the late twentieth century, Staniland explores thematic concerns in terms of their role in elucidating a literary journey towards agency: that is, towards the articulation of a socially and personally viable female gendered identity, mindful of both the hegemonic discourses that constrain it, and the possibility of their deconstruction and reconfiguration. Myth, exile and the female body are the three central themes for understanding the personal, social and political aims of the Post-Boom women writers whose work is explored in this volume: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Ángeles Mastretta, Sylvia Molloy, Cristina Peri Rossi and Zoé Valdés. Their adoption, and adaptation, of an originally eighteenth-century and European literary genre is seen here to reshape the global canon as much as it works to reshape our understanding of gendered identities as socially constructed, culturally contingent, and open-ended.

Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture

Cold War American Literature and the Rise of Youth Culture
Author: Denis Jonnes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2014-09-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317649478

Demands placed on many young Americans as a result of the Cold War give rise to an increasingly age-segregated society. This separation allowed adolescents and young adults to begin to formulate an identity distinct from previous generations, and was a significant factor in their widespread rejection of contemporary American society. This study traces the emergence of a distinctive post-war family dynamic between parent and adolescent or already adult child. In-depth readings of individual writers such as, Arthur Miller, William Styron, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O’Connor and Sylvia Plath, situate their work in relation to the Cold War and suggest how the figuring of adolescents and young people reflected and contributed to an empowerment of American youth. This book is a superb research tool for any student or academic with an interest in youth culture, cultural studies, American studies, cold war studies, twentieth-century American literature, history of the family, and age studies.

Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration

Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration
Author: Wessam Elmeligi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2020-12-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1793600988

Cultural Identity in Arabic Novels of Immigration: A Poetics of Return offers a new perspective of migration studies that views the concept of migration in Arabic as inherently embracing the notion of return. Starting the study with the significance of the Islamic hijra as the quintessential migrant narrative in Arabic culture, Elmeligi offers readings of Arabic narratives as early as Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan and as recent asMiral Al-Tahawy’s 2010 Brooklyn Heights, and asvaried as Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz’s short story adaptation of the ancient Egyptian Tale of Sinuhe and Yemeni novelist Mohammed Abdl Wali’s They Die Strangers, includingnovels that have not been translated in English before, such as Sonallah Ibrahim’s Amrikanli and Suhayl Idris’ The Latin Quarter. To contextualize these narratives, Elmeligi employs studies of cultural identity and their features that are most impacted by migration. In this study, Elmeligi analyzes the different manifestations of return, whether physical or psychological, commenting not only on the decisions that the characters take in the novels, but also the narrative choices that the writers make, thus viewing narrativity as a form of performativity of cultural identity as well. The book addresses fresh angles of migration studies, identity theory, and Arabic literary analysis that are of interest to scholars and students.

Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture

Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture
Author: Tara Stubbs
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2017-03-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317446437

This study develops the important work carried out on American literature through the frameworks of transnational, transatlantic, and trans-local studies to ask what happens when these same aspects become intrinsic to the critical narrative. Much cultural criticism since the 1990s has sought to displace perceptions of American exceptionalism with broader notions of Atlanticism, transnationalism, world-system, and trans-localism as each has redefined the US and the world more generally. This collection shows how the remapping of America in terms of global networks, and as a set of particular localities, or even glocalities, now plays out in Americanist scholarship, reflecting on the critical consequences of the spatial turn in American literary and cultural studies. Spanning twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, fiction, memoir, visual art, publishing, and television, and locating the US in Caribbean, African, Asian, European, and other contexts, this volume argues for a re-modelling of American-ness with the transnational as part of its innate rhetoric. It includes discussions of travel, migration, disease, media, globalization, and countless other examples of inflowing. Essays focus on subjects tracing the contemporary contours of the transnational, such as the role of the US in the rise of the global novel, the impact of Caribbean history on American thought (and vice versa), transatlantic cultural and philosophical genealogies and correspondences, and the exchanges between the poetics of American space and those of other world spaces. Asking questions about the way the American eye has traversed and consumed the objects and cultures of the world, but how that world is resistant, this volume will make an important contribution to American and Transatlantic literary studies.

The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and Culture

The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and Culture
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2020-06-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004408045

The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality in U.S. Literature and Culture explores hospitality in literature, language and cinema from a variety of methodological perspectives that illustrate the richness of American hospitality.

Intersecting Diasporas

Intersecting Diasporas
Author: Suzanne Manizza Roszak
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2021-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438481632

Intersecting Diasporas examines literary expressions of allyship between Italian America and other diasporic communities in modern and contemporary US fiction. Rewriting the Anglo-American genre of the "Italian novel," authors like James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Carolina De Robertis, and Chang-rae Lee have disrupted misconceptions of Italian and Italian American identity while confronting Italians' own complicity with white racism. Likewise, Italian American authors from John Fante to Tina De Rosa have written in solidarity with Black, Chicanx, Filipinx, Jewish, Romani, and Irish diasporic communities on US shores, unsettling stereotypes and dissecting Italian America's history of flawed allyship across diasporas. Suzanne Manizza Roszak traces these gestures of literary solidarity; considers how they relate to the writers' critiques of toxic masculinity, antiqueerness, and socioeconomic injustice; and proposes interdiasporic allyship as a practice of reconciliation and healing.