| Drawing on feminist theory, poststructuralism, and postrolonial studies, the dissertation adopts the framework of translation in order to examine autobiographical narratives written by first- and second-generation immigrant women in Canada and the United States. The selection of texts includes Mary Antin's The Promised Land, Laura Goodman Salverson's Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter, Akemi Kikumura's Through Harsh Winters, Apolonja Maria Kojder's Marynia, Don't Cry, Sandra Oancia's Remember: Helen's Story, Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, Smaro Kamboureli's in the second person , and Marlene Nourbese Philip's Looking for Livingstone. Application of contemporary theories of translation, genre, subjectivity, and alterity, formulated by such critics as Jacques Derrida, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Rey Chow, demonstrates through discourse analysis that immigrant women's life writing is a contradictory site of linguistic and cultural production governed by mechanisms of complicity, conflict, containment, commodification, subversion, and legitimization. Viewed from an integrative feminist perspective, immigrant women's texts reveal the instability and constructedness of such concepts as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, and diaspora. The category "immigrant women" is fractured along the lines of unequal privilege accorded by different constructions of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, and ability, as well as by concomitant access to language, literacy, and cultural institutions. In contrast to canonical models of autobiography, women's life writing narratives often offer enabling subject-positions that can be described as translative, transnational, border-crossing, migratory, fluid, and contradictory. Translation-based approaches allow us to move beyond the exclusionary logic of the binary, toward the spaces in-between where multiple transformations can and do take place. Consequently, such approaches can provide Women's Studies with new models of encounters between self and other. Attention to language practices is crucial in trying to understand continuous social and individual negotiations of power and to eliminate cultural and linguistic imperialism. |
