| This study addresses the issue of how marginalized and displaced subjects identify themselves and what are some of the strategies they use in their self-representation. I argue that writing is one of the strongest resistance practices by members of marginalized groups who have limited access to discourses of the dominant culture. Living between worlds and cultures, these people turn to writing as a site where they rewrite such concepts as identity, culture, and community from their perspective of cultural displacement and dislocation. In my study, I include autobiographical narratives by contemporary women writers from different geographical locations and cultures: Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, Joy Kogawa's Obasan, Sally Morgan's My Place, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and Cleo Odzer's Papong Sisters. As a tool for self-representation, this kind of narrative is one that bridges between art and the everyday life, memory and history, the past and the present. What these narratives suggest is the desire on the part of marginalized and displaced people not merely to deconstruct fixed categories as a means of spatial containment of identities but also to proliferate new psychic and social spaces for the reformulation of interconnectedness both within and between cultures. |
