Lena Karlsson
Docent | Universitetslektor | Stf Prefekt
Multiple Affiliations: Autobiographical Narratives of Displacement by (Im)migrant U.S, Women
Författare
Summary, in English
Whereas the conventional immigration/assimilation paradigm assumes the resolvability of difference, (im)migration, related to the concept of diaspora, is sensitive to "different differences," related to race, class, gender,etc. Further, (im)migration points to the variability and mobility within the immigrant experience.I use the concept of diaspora, not as a metaphor, but as a lens through which to investigate subjectivities that disturb the assumed union between place, culture and identity. I further employ various exigencies of "locational feminism" to take into account shifting, unstable, postmodern identities and, at the same time, pay attention to historical and material particularities.
Multiple Affiliations shows how "diasporic" dialectics - negotiations of here and there, continuity and change, roots and routes - continually shape (im)migrant subjectivities, even if the possibility of returning to the homeland is precluded and even if the experience of immigration is not firsthand. Acts of imaginative memory are called upon to re-configure diasporic identity by linking the present and the past, here and there, self and ethnic group, and with marked insistence to rewrite history, frequently to trouble national schemes. I propose that, far from inhabiting separate spheres, immigrant and diasporic sensibilities often overlap.
Publiceringsår
2001
Språk
Engelska
Dokumenttyp
Doktorsavhandling
Förlag
Skrifter från moderna språk 2, Umeå Universitet
Ämne
- Gender Studies
Nyckelord
- autobiography
- (im)migration
- United States
- diaspora
- locational feminism
- history
- memory
- place
- home/displacement
- body
- postmodern
- subjectivity
Status
Published
Handledare
- Raoul Granqvist
Försvarsdatum
5 maj 2001
Försvarstid
10:15
Försvarsplats
Hörsal E, humanisthuset, Umeå Universitet
Opponent
- Clara Juncker (Professor)