Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (235 pages)
- Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature Series .
- Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature Series .
Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Roots and Routes in American Literature about Return -- Part I Return as Memory Reconstructed -- 1 Migration, Exclusion, and "Home" in Edwidge Danticat's Narratives of Return -- 2 Between Home and Loss: Inscribing Return in Ruth Behar's An Island Called Home -- 3 Nightmares from My Parents: Return as Recovery in Doan Hòang's Oh, Saigon -- Part II Restorative Nostalgias: Return as Emotional Re-Attachment -- 4 Andrew Lam's Narratives of Return: From Viet Kieu Nostalgia to Discrepant Cosmopolitanisms -- 5 Returning Home: Iranian-American Women's Memoirs and Reflective Nostalgia -- 6 Enacting an Identity by Re-Creating a Home: Eleni Gage's North of Ithaka -- 7 El vaivén de la vida: Musings on Deterritorialized Border Subjects -- Part III Impossible Returns -- 8 Cuban Geographies: The Roots/Routes of Ana Menéndez Narratives -- 9 "The Inextinguishable Longings for Elsewheres": The Impossibility of Return in Junot Díaz -- 10 Returning to Places of No Return in Stuart Dybek's Short Stories -- List of Contributors -- Index.
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.