Between Boundaries:Transnational Negotiations In The Contemporary Caribbean American Novels

Since the early 1990s,"transnationalism" has emerged from transnational studies as a way to avoid the pitfalls of the rigid formulations of nationalist structures and nationalism-induced citizenship.It calls into questions homogeneity,essentiality and dichotomized epistemology under a nationalist framework with its deterritorialized cultural interconnection,mobility and hybridity.As a macro research formula,it has currently become popular in the field of social sciences,which has further brought a paradigm shift—the transnational turn to literary studies.Along with the enactment of 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and the concurrent large number of Caribbean immigrants moving into the U.S.,the contemporary Caribbean American literature has come into prominence with distinguished writers such as Junot Diaz,Edwidge Danticat,Julia Alvarez,Paule Marshall,and so on.In the few studies of contemporary Caribbean American novels,little scholarship has concerned the transnational perspectives.Most of them are conducted under the three nationalist paradigms.The first focuses on U.S.-based identity politics,invariably viewing Caribbean American literature as a reflection of Caribbean migrants' life primarily in the U.S.and its impact on the residential societies.It fails to study the source cultures appropriately.The second centers on the Caribbean ancestral lands.It is committed to analyzing how writers reinterpret and reconstruct national histories,hardly observing the impact of transnational migrations on national history in the global context.The third is on the study of home narratives.Although it adopts a double vision and notices the multiplicity of home,it privileges the vision of a Caribbean homeland or centers on the migrants' home-making in the adoptive land,largely neglecting the two-way outflows in the cross-border social fields.Therefore,the clear national divide somewhat contributes to a new polarized opposition.It is in essence a hidden mode of nationalism.Though currently still a useful analytical term,nationalism tends to regard nation-state as self-contained units,neglecting the complex trans-local interplay.Instead,I argue that "transnationalism"is more appropriate to describe the varied national affiliations and cultural dialogues that emerge as a result of the transnational interactions in this genre.Besides,the scholarship is often limited to Caribbean American ethnic branches or individual works with very rare holistic researches.Since the common Caribbean heritages which include a shared historical and political progression(slavery,colonization,revolution,independence,dictatorship,poverty and the Caribbean's Third World status)and a similar cultural hybridization(languages,religions,ethnicity/races,customs,etc)have been identified by both Caribbean American writers and their works,it is workable to study them as a single category in spite of a variety of branches existing in this genre.Thus,this dissertation has conducted,from a transnational comparative perspective,an overall research of the seven contemporary novels by the six representative writers originally from the three representative Caribbean areas—the Anglophone,the Franchophone,the Hispanophone.The main body is composed of three chapters,covering negotiation of ideas of "history," "identity" and "home" in the contemporary Caribbean American novels under a transnational framework.On the whole,transnationalism is highlighted as one unifying concept running through the three chapters within the migratory context that links the environments of home land and host land together.The three themes form an organic integration."History"is the starting point,origin,or macro-level background of identity exploration and home pursuing;"identity" speaks for the process of searching;and "home" points to an ultimate belonging.Among them,"identity" is the central point.It relates to the past,and desires for a future home in an unremitting pursuit.The first chapter "Negotiation of History" examines the transnational negotiation of historical issues by focusing on hybrid historiography in terms of genre,language,chronotope in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,border writing(both physical and metaphorical)in Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones and liminal space(both explicit and implicit)in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban.In a trans-hemispheric dialogue between histories,cultures and politics,these writers partake in a revision and re-envision of official and popular history across national borders and thus provide a voice for the post-colonial "subaltern."The second chapter "Negotiation of Identity" explores the impact of the transnational dynamics of race/ethnicity,gender and class on identity politics by centering on racial/ethnic mobility in Piri Thomas' Down These Mean Streets,gender transformation in Edwidge Danticat's Breath,Eyes,Memory,and a comprehensive analysis of racial,gender and class fluidity in Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.Voyaging between worlds,these writers are well aware of and engaged in the Caribbean sociocultural legacies and their dynamic effects on the U.S.subjectivity to reconstitute transnational identities of the characters.The third chapter "Negotiation of Home" remaps a new picture of transnational home(land)landscape by focusing on both real and imaginary home constructs at the micro level in association with the variables like gender,generation and specific political relations,economic interactions,social organization and more generally cultural inter-connectivity in Caribbean American novels.Different from homogeneous and exclusive national mode of home(land),transmigrants' home patterns are multifaceted—the U.S.home,the Caribbean home and the transnational communities which exhibit the cross-border interactions and mutual interdependence of the local and the diaspora.This project reveals that these novels go in for a new model of transnational writings and participate in a process of cultural negotiations by dealing with various historical,sociocultural,political and economic forces at work in transnationalized spaces and thus replace local stasis with transnational dynamics.As such,to reconsider the Caribbean American novels with the dialectic dual frame of reference,it seeks to add a fresh view to this burgeoning literary field of inquiry.This project also separates Caribbean American literature from other larger cultural circles like Latino/a literature with a focus on its own "poetics." By providing a panoramic presentation of Caribbean American novels,this dissertation has attempted to remap a clear and independent development of this genre,make up for the insufficiency of the current sporadic studies and further push the overall researches on Caribbean American literature as well as World Literature.