| This dissertation explores the role of internal migration in selected 20th-century texts by U.S. women. Specifically, I look at how the symbolic use of space is shaped by race, gender, and movement in Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), Sanora Babb's Whose Names Are Unknown (written 1939/published 2004), Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). While all four novels share a common theme of movement and displacement, each speaks to a different period in the twentieth century and to different racial and economic concerns. Placed next to each other, these texts provide insight into the migrations that shaped and continue to shape contemporary U.S. culture, including the "unprecedented" Katrina disaster. In essence, I ask what happens to a bounded group of people when they become unbounded through movement. My analysis details such "commutatory practices," a term I chose to reflect how various migratory behaviors played out historically to mutate or refashion community. I argue that the movement of people affects the role of community, self, and space in identifiable, repeatable, and alterable ways.;Taken together, my analysis of these texts contribute to the contemporary space theory project of exploring and contesting the overriding notion that space is empty, neutral, evolves organically, and is accessible to all. My project argues that representations of 20th-century American migrations expose that power relations are heavily inflected by the spaces in which they occur and that they reflect the larger cultural concerns of their historical moment while also revealing how literature can provide alternative histories of space by means of the commutatory practices that help to construct it. By investigating journeys written by women from differing racial and ethnic positions, this project expands the description of what modern internal movement looks like in the United States so as to recapture a fuller sense of the past and to help ensure that in the future these mass migrations do not fall outside of existing categories of thought so that, in our contemporary moment, we might not retread the same ground. |
