Adolescent empires: Identity, liminality, and advocacy in contemporary American literature

The dissertation analyzes the intersections between the discourse of adolescence and the discourse of Empire. The adolescent is a major, if not the central, figure in the rhetoric of Empire, specifically as a site of adult anxiety and imperial contestation. Chapter 1 revisits Homi Bhabha's reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved in The Location of Culture and filters his examination of the unhomely through the lens of adolescence. It moves on to consider adolescent unhomeliness in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine. In these texts, the postcolonial feeling of unhomeliness joins with the adolescent character's growing unease in her domestic surroundings. From this join springs tension between the sense of identity and the sense of belonging that the adolescent character must negotiate. Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of Rudyard Kipling's Kim as a prototypical text of adolescent liminality, then investigates four distinct types of liminality (racial, spatial, cultural, and gendered) in Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother and Alicia Erian's Towelhead. Victor Turner's famous definition of the liminal as "betwixt and between" proper stages of development diminishes and colonizes the liminal state of adolescence. Adolescent characters that simultaneously experience other kinds of liminalities learn to live among the contradictions and ambiguities that arise from that state. Indeed, they learn to question the legitimacy and desirability of entering into postliminality. Chapter 3 frames Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa as a model of anthropological elision and cohesion. Mead's text uses an Orientalist construction of adolescence in Samoa in order to reflect on American adolescence. Elements in Mead's anthropological writing carry over into literature that proposes to speak on behalf of adolescents. In particular, this chapter focuses on the figure of the adolescent Muslim woman as an object of advocacy. The primary texts in Chapter 3 are Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass: Memoirs of a Harem Girlhood and Suzanne Fisher Staples's young adult novel Shabanu. Finally, the discussion shifts from Empire to multitude; subversive artifacts of adolescence, namely memoirs of adolescence, are examined as potential products of the multitude.