Collaboration, collectivity, and trans/nationality : intersectional affiliation in Child Of The Dark by Carolina Maria De Jesus, Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia, and Imaginary Parents by Sheila Ortiz Taylor and Sandra Ortiz
Crystal Marie Kurzen (Author)
Abstract: This project analyzes how three women's narratives from the second half of the twentieth century represent identity production as inescapably intersectional and affiliated. In Child of the Dark, the diary entries of Carolina Maria de Jesus negotiate her subject position as an Afro-Brazilian single mother struggling to get through everyday in the poverty-stricken favela where she lives outside of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The collaboration of a journalist in heavily editing her diary entries, however, altered the subject she constructs in the text. Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia engages questions of exile and trans/national identity construction. Garcia's four female protagonists represent multiple generations of Cuban women with different affiliations to both Cuba and the United States. These characters negotiate a fractured history and, at times, even a separation from their places of origin, searching for home spaces that ultimately only exist in-between. In Imaginary Parents by Sheila Ortiz Taylor and Sandra Ortiz Taylor, the authors work collectively to create a visual-verbal family autobiography, tackling issues of co-production and auto/biography within their text. All three cases provide models that challenge traditional definitions of autobiography through their qualities of collaboration, collectivity, and trans/nationality to create spaces of empowerment and affiliation for validating women's identities - and the identities of other immigrant or marginal peoples
Thesis, Dissertation, English, 1977
Ohio State University, [Columbus], 1977