Embracing Otherness: The Role of Nostalgia in Bicultural Identity Formation in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Dreaming in Cuban, and An American Brat

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although nostalgia is an intrinsic part of immigrant literature, it has been consistently portrayed negatively as a painful and romantic sentiment surrounding the loss of home that impairs a person from living in the present. It is viewed as a sickness that makes adjustment or assimilation in the adopted land difficult. However, dissenting from the critics who have downplayed nostalgia, I attest that immigrant nostalgia is a complex response to numerous social, political, economic, and cultural phenomena that intermingle in the experience of immigrant relocation and social integration. Hence, concurring with Stuart Tannock, Fred Davis, and Andreea Deciu Ritivoi I claim that rather than creating a hindrance in functioning in the present life, nostalgia facilitates continuity of the immigrant self. Analyzing the nostalgic tendency of the central characters of Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents, Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, and Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat: A Novel, I demonstrate the correlation between immigrant nostalgia and identity formation arguing that, instead of being the exclusive product of emotional predisposition or self-indulgence, their nostalgia and the journey back home assist them in reevaluating their self and position in the adopted land and initiate the formation of bicultural identity.