Willa Cather, migrant intellectual: Reading Cather's novels using theories of migration and diaspora

This dissertation reads Cather as a migrant intellectual. Using theories of migration and diaspora, I claim that Cather's own displacement in her early life, her experience of living and growing up among the migrants in Nebraska, and her subsequent migratory experience lead her to locate migrancy as the central force in shaping the evolving American national character. Hence, migrancy features prominently in her novels, starting from the migrants depicted in the prairie novels to recording the diasporic struggles in the South West and Quebec, and finally ending with the story of the most oppressed diasporic community of the nation, African Americans. In her exploration of migrancy, Cather's novels become "contact zones" where she records how migrants/diasporic communities and the dominant culture encounter each other, negotiate, translate, and get translated. For Cather, the encounters do not lead to easy assimilation of the immigrants, but to the creation of America as a hybrid space. Even as she celebrates the hybrid formations, Cather's delineation of migrancy doesn't homogenize migrant experience; rather she shows that the history behind the displacement and the categories of race, class, and gender inflect and influence migrants' experiences, allowing some to be assimilated and leaving others unassimilable.;Because migrant experience in the U.S. is contingent upon the migrant's history of displacement and her/his race, class, and gender, I, therefore, argue that Cather's depiction of migrancy complicates the dominant American narrative. Cather's representation of America as a hybrid space contests the hegemonic and homogenizing tendency of the "national narrative." In excavating migrant stories in America, Cather complicates the "old white memory" and the genealogical narrative of her home(land). Her novels contain within them the narratives of not just the European (im)migrants but also of the Native Indian, Mexican, and the African Americans along with all the antecedent stories of violence, cruelty, and exploitation, which often get silenced in the dominant narratives. By including the narratives of the silenced migrants, Cather shows that their stories have always been actively present and that they have always dynamically affected the ongoing "uneven becoming" of the American character.