Diaspora, Identity and Gender in Indian-American and African-Italian Women's Memoirs: Meena Alexander, Sara Suleri, Shirin Ramzanali Fazel, Igiaba Scego

Abstract

In this thesis I propose a multi-disciplinary methodology that combines Postcolonial and Gender Studies with Feminist Theory and Women’s Writing and places memoirs authored by diasporic women writers within a comparative and gendered frame. My study focuses on two Indian-American authors: Meena Alexander (1951-2018) and Sara Suleri (1953-2022) and two African (Somali) Italian authors: Shirin Ramzanali Fazel (1959-) and Igiaba Scego (1974-). The inevitable specificities of their postcolonial history notwithstanding, what these writers have in common, which is indeed the rationale for bringing them under the same spectrum of analysis here, is a postcolonial legacy marked by a complex entanglement between multiculturalism, integration and citizenship, as well as a shared condition of ‘minority’ in terms of both gender and race. In the wake of colonialism women have been able to develop discursive counter-strategies and forge novel ways to rewrite the self and renegotiate their sexual difference vis-à-vis masculine and colonial patterns of authority. They have done so by resorting to, amongst other venues, the literary form as a powerful instrument with which to (re)shape national cultures in a way more hospitable to their presence. In the texts that I consider in this thesis: Fault Lines (1993); Meatless Days (1989); Lontano da Mogadiscio (1994); La mia casa è dove sono (2010) this operation of negotiation and reconfiguration of the Self translates into intimate, first-person narratives calling for new, hybrid identities. These memoirs allow for a comparative textual analysis around three thematic clusters that encompass key realms in both postcolonial and women’s writings: (i) Displaced subjects: Home and Belonging; (ii) Negotiating Otherness; (iii) Trans/Border-Trans/Genre—which correspond to the three sections of this thesis. Section (i) involves the study of how, in postcolonial women’s writings, the body inhabits space, understood as either the physical (in the sense of mappable) or symbolic (in the sense of conceptual), socially determined dimension. Section (ii) investigates the control of female body and sexuality by patriarchal and colonial structures and how this affects the (transnational) female identity. Section (iii) is concerned with the position of the writer vis-à-vis the canon and, thus, the genre experimentations and formal innovations put forth by postcolonial women’s narratives. Each section will thus adopt an inter-disciplinary methodology through a focus on the intersections with Women’s Studies and related disciplines (namely: the philosophy of body; phenomenology; feminist theory; genre studies). The approach adopted in this study is inter-cultural and non-essentialising, paying attention to different social, historical and regional differences. Insisting upon connections and discrepancies through which, in these literatures, sexual difference intersects with other categories (i.e., race, class, nationality, religion, and sexual preference), the focus will be on how postcolonial women writers, understood not as a monolithic category but as multiply organised, contribute to our understanding of transnational identities and cultural hybridisation. Moving beyond single-country scholarship, this thesis thus intends to contribute to restore the place of women writers as meaning and nation-making cultural agents in post-colonial literature via an intersectional approach based on cross-cultural readings that brings together English and European Literature. The comparative dimension is central to this study. It aims at revealing commonalities and differences in how women writing from diverse historical, political and cultural locations articulate their ‘I’ and how their shared experience of multiple belongings affects and problematises, whilst also enriching, the representation of their selves, fictitious or otherwise.