Un/settled migrations: Rethinking nation through the second generation in black Canadian and black British women's writing.

摘要

This project extends discourses of diaspora and postcolonialism by considering literary representations of second generation children of migrants in black Canadian and black British women's writing. Primary texts examined include Dionne Brand's What We All Long For (2005), Esi Edugyan's The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004), Tessa McWatt's Out of My Skin (1998), Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon (1999), and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000).;The study contends that while the second generation does not migrate, they nonetheless trouble singular, fixed notions of cultural, ethnic, and national identity. Choosing neither assimilation nor nationalist affiliation with their parents' countries of birth, a second generation instead articulates new problem-spaces from which they reconsider Canada and the UK, and rethink the concept of 'settlement' to account for its non-hegemonic possibilities.;A second generation's engagement with the nation is based in a transformative and constitutive rather than an oppositional politics, as they rearticulate ethical social citizenship and create inhabitable spaces for themselves. As these texts rethink spatial relations, they also re-evaluate gender relations, foregrounding the intersections between familial micropolitics and national/global macropolitics. By rethinking nation, these texts also articulate other possibilities through which to understand the familial and the spatial.;Chapter 1 argues that Brand's novel displays a deep investment in the place of Toronto, writing a new type of city in which a second generation can expand the paradigms of social citizenship. Chapter 2, focusing on Edugyan, explores the contested narratives of un/settlement on the Canadian prairies, and the political implications of rethinking kinship. Chapter 3 argues that McWatt's novel contemplates possibilities for ethical belonging in a hemisphere built upon colonial violence and Aboriginal oppression. Chapter 4 considers the processes through which Levy struggles to redefine Englishness by testing the myth of "return" to Jamaica and finding it an inadequate paradigm through which to understand the second generation. Chapter 5 argues that Smith portrays a nation destabilized by its own melancholic confusion regarding the place of its British-born 'others.' Together, these five texts enact conditions of possibility, establishing different terms in which to make demands of, and about, nations.