Syncretic spirits of (a)national literatures by women in the Americas

In my discussion of texts by women writers, who have diasporic heritages in common, I focus on culturally specific constructions of gender, spirituality, and nationality. An accomplishment of these women's writings is that in refuting the legacies of colonialism and nationalism, the authors offer literary alternatives and inaugurate syncretic traditions, which fuse conflicting cultural and religious beliefs. Through an analysis of these writers' works, I propose not to define the sacred, but I show the ways in which spirituality and its syncretic presences in contemporary women's literature offer opportunities for re-reading fiction. These writers create and install cultural citizenship, which proposes an alternative to postcolonial, postmodern, multicultural, and global feminist paradigms. I, therefore, highlight the ethnographic aspects of these novels, essays, and film, which transcend linear narratives, culturally specific gender expectations, and boundaries of genre.; The first chapter examines Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead and these authors' treatment of ethnographic misrepresentations of gender and two-spirit peoples by reinstating a syncretic tradition. Silko and Allen blend Native American and Euramerican traditions to create both new literature and ceremonial texts.; Similar in approach, Chapter 2 presents an interdisciplinary probe into fiction, poetry, and theory by Gloria Anzaldua, Sandra Cisneros, Alicai Gaspar de Alba, and Carmen Tafolla who highlight the cultural and spiritual relationships of four Latina icons to their community. These Chicana writers, rereading the feminine Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Guadalupe, La Malinche, and the santera (saint-maker), reinvent transcultural spiritualities in everyday life.; In Chapter 3, Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, and Julie Dash's film, Daughters of the Dust, innovatively reinstate the abiku, or African spirit child, in the framing of their respective narratives. I argue that the protagonists successfully bridge cultural and historical gaps in the Diaspora.; In the final chapter, I examine the relationship between the United States and Haiti in the novels of Edwidge Danticat and the literary criticism of Myriam J. A. Chancy. Here, Creole and the marassas, or twins, become operative agents in the ever-changing voudou faith and in the literature representing it.