Daughters and Their Countries: Nostalgia and Ambivalence in Transnational Feminist Practice

292 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997.The four ostensibly different narrative projects share an almost obsessive sifting through past experience; and in confronting the hauntings of self through sexual and national identities, these texts inscribe the complex emotions and subjectivities generated by their "fixation" on past homes. The narrative practices that generate these inscriptions suggest the possibility of a complex agency situated in the structures of nostalgia, a self-conscious and difficult nostalgia that encompasses both what is re-membered, and opens textual spaces for a representation of what remains forgotten, inaccessible. Such a narrative practice is feminist in its oppositional complications of the more comforting and stable narratives of selfhood and nationhood. By engaging the intersections of the psychic and the political, these texts insist on an excavation of the invasive discourses that both constrain and enable the daughter-narrator's agency. What she has, and what she has lost, are questions that ground these autobiographical inquiries and motivate a self-inscription through and against the fictions of home, family, and nation/culture that haunt her. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD