Configuring intellectual migrancy: Fractured nations, fragmented subjects, ruptured texts (Meena Alexander, Eva Hoffman, Nuruddin Farah, Somalia)

My dissertation focuses on the intellectual migrant subject and its relationship to the American nation. In the dialectic of belonging and unbelonging the migrant subject engages in multiple acts of crossing borders—cultural, ethnic and linguistic borders. My dissertation extrapolates instances of the migrant subject(s) textual and theoretical exploration of the psychical and physical spaces that have caused multiple dislocations and fractured their consciousness. The dissertation argues that fracture in the migrant psyche produce theories that demarcate the nation as both a fractured construct and an ambivalent space. The research moves toward theorizing how the twentieth century migrant's discursive “text” is also indicative of a fracture in the migrant consciousness—a space from which the migrant subject articulates the nation. This research concurrently theorizes a psychoanalytic treatment of the subject with a postcolonial treatment of the nation. In stating migrant subjectivity the dissertation uses three main literary texts: Meena Alexander's Faultlines, Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation and Nuruddin Farah's Maps. All these works construct overlaps, tensions and differences in their construction of (im)migrant and exile subjectivity. Since the research required to produce conditions of migrancy overlaps several genres and disciplines, the dissertation draws on materials from postcolonial theory, literary texts, critical theory, social/cultural theory, literary criticism, along with a full length creative chapter to explore conditions of homelessness and dislocation.