Conjured communities: The multiperspectival novels of Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, Louise Erdrich and Cristina Garcia

This project examines one specific narrative form that characterizes contemporary literature by women of color in the United States: the multiperspectival novel. In borrowing a novelistic device of "high modernism" implemented in the works of writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner, the artists under consideration in this study reappropriate this experimental form in order to theorize the political positioning of gendered and racial communities in the U.S. Rather than harkening back to fictions of a previously solidified cultural and economic order, these texts refuse the monolithic and monologic fantasies of a more positivistic notion of community in favor of analyses that foreground an agonistic understanding of interrelational social systems. Each chapter explores the lines of congruence and difference across class, racial, and gendered borders in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, and Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban.;The study imports recent theoretical formulations on postcoloniality and cultural resistance in order to examine the complex relations between issues of representation and political dominance as they are presented within the psychological "interiors" that the novel form provides. Most significantly, these novelists are considered innovators of what I call the "female postcolonial"--a hybrid region of literary production that dovetails the psychoanalytic strain of feminism with the historical dimensions of Marxism. Since postcolonial criticism has crystallized around masculine paradigms of cultural and political crossings, the female postcolonial offers a model which not only continues to flush out the hybrid exclusions of social interaction but also re-writes that understanding through an openly gendered lens.