| Drawing upon the work of Chandra Talpade Mohanty, this dissertation is born of a concern regarding the prevalence of criticism that presents essentializing analyses of work by minority writers; therefore, the primary aim of this research is to complicate readings of immigrant literatures, particularly those of immigrant women. All too often, literary analyses of minority women writers' works offer reductive and, at times, even inaccurate readings of specific immigrant realities. Such literary criticism posits a continuous and universal female immigrant identity as well as an immutable, inescapable immigrant status. Consequently, analyses of their literary works frequently represent their immigrant experiences as those of perpetual victims trapped at the juncture of an absolute cultural divide between static cultures: that of their culture of origin and of their "guest country." Other essentializing readers suggest that, in spite of the immigrant woman's apparent lack of agency, she has felicitous options: after resolving her ethnic conflicts, which include a formulaic critique of the guest country's culture, these critics presume that the immigrant woman achieves a joyful assimilation or, more accurately, a state of felicitous hybridity in which she consciously chooses the best aspects from each discrete culture and finds fortuitous personal resolution.;In this project, I explore writing by the Jewish Argentine writers Cecilia Absatz (1943- ) and Nora Glickman (1944- ), the Turkish German writers Seyran Ates (1963- ) and Yade Kara (1965- ), and the Chinese American writers Gish Jen 1955- ) and Sigrid Nunez (1951- ). By examining their works through a non-binary rather than a binary lens, this research complicates the logics of incommensurability and stereotypical facile hybridity that have prevailed in the literary analysis of narratives of immigrant women. The readings offered here avoid such dichotomies as inclusion vs. exclusion, majority vs. minority, oppressor vs. oppressed, or the center vs. periphery/margin/fringe/interstice of nations and endeavors, in order to instead enhance the literary criticism of minority writing, to portray minority women as integral members of the nations that many of them have come to view as their home countries. These women writers, as instigators of change who are capable of refashioning the circumstances of their lives, also fashion narratives that present their own critical perspective on their own situation. |
