Narratives of relocation : negotiations between home and exile

Abstract EN

The discursive formations of new immigrant literature have almost taken the shape of a separate identity of a genre which I would prefer to call the 'narratives of relocation'.

People, in the course of their movements, swung between the in-betweenness of home and exile, with a sense of 'two worlds', strive to cope with the enigmatic nature of their ordeals of arrival and survival.

The ordeals of their ambivalent subject positions get represented in artistic terms in the discursive practices, more recently, of immigrant literature, for which American multiculturalism has provided a complex space for the issues immigrant literature deal with.

The paper argues for a comprehensive critical and comparative remapping of these practices.

The paper will include authors from Asian American diasporas particularly those whose works have been pioneering in providing 'interpretation' of maladies / dilemmas immigrants confront in their adjustment with the new sociocultural environment by becoming a 'middleman' in interpenetrating the meaning of America through 'quest narratives' and by defining the nature of identity in terms of gender, race or sexuality.

The paper will examine how their exploration of the challenges of cultural displacement through a distinctive author-protagonist relationship revealing the uneasy negotiations between the traditional homeland culture and the American culture on the issues of assimilation and resistance, through a complex, multi-layered, heteroglossic and quasi-fictional narrative by a complex intermingling of fact and fantasy, history and biography, the echoes of an autobiographical subject, and even the invocation of ghosts as an aid to tell stories are constructs to relocate their homes.