Lena Karlsson

Multiple affiliations : autobiographical narratives of displacement by (im)migrant US women Lena Karlsson

Multiple Affiliations explores the autobiographical negotiations of memory and multilocality articulated by five (im)migrant women writing from, and being read (primarily) within, the US. Texts as diverse as Korean-American Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée (1982), Polish (Jewish)-American Eva Hoffman' Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1982), Chinese-American Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976) and China Men (1980), Caribbean/African-American Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and Pakistani-American Sara Suleri's Meatless Days (1989) highlight how various (cross-race and transnational) experiences of location, dislocation, and relocation resonate with each other and "immigrant America." These texts widen and displace the generic boundaries of autobiography. Multiple Affiliations investigates the ways in which these autobiographies gesture beyond the individual self to the networks of relation that constitute that self. It elucidates the ways in which these (im)migrant text gesture beyond the US as setting and context for belonging, communion, and self-formation.