| This dissertation, Women on the Edge: Autobiographical Selves and the Lure of the Boundary in U.S. Literature, studies the politics of self-representation in literary autobiographies by women of color. I evoke theory derived from Latin American studies to explore twentieth-century personal narratives in relation to the understanding of boundaries as sites of rupture, connection, transmission, violence, and transformation. Rather than solely focusing on the concept of borders as nationalistic lines of demarcation dividing geopolitical space, I recognize the border as a trope that defines identity while delineating and connecting Self and Other, first world and third, male and female, fictional and nonfictional representations.; The postmodern, female-authored autobiographies that I study disrupt rigid formulations of autobiography as a factual, chronologic, first-person-singular life story. Building on the theories of James Olney, Philippe Lejeune, Sidonie Smith, Domna Stanton, and Leigh Gilmore, I propose a more elastic definition of autobiography that recognizes—validates—diverse subjectivities that depart from, or adapt, Western ideologies concerning selfhood. The texts central to this study are Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1975) and China Men (1977), Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on the Road (1942) and Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller (1981). The axes of geography, memory and body organize the project conceptually, illuminating the strategies of autobiographical self-invention in striking ways. In Chapter One, I pair Kingston's and Anzaldúa's autobiographies in order to highlight how the concepts of (re)imagined and ancestral homeland undermine dominant narratives of nation and rewrite women into nation-making moments. With special attention to the politics of cross-dressing and the economics of body, Chapter Two studies the representation of racialized bodies as aberrant, alien, or ghostly in Kingston's and Hurston's texts. Chapter Three explores memory as a border terrain where truth and imagination merge, testing the interface between fiction, nonfiction, authenticity, and autobiography in the works of Kingston and Silko. |
