“I AM THE LINK BETWEEN THE SHORES WASHED BY THE CARIBBEAN SEA”: ERNA BRODBER’İN LOUISIANA ADLI ROMANINDA KARAYİPLER BAĞLANTISI VE ÇOK KÜLTÜRLÜ AMERİKAN GÜNEYİNİN YENİDEN YAPILANDIRILMASI

Abstract

The U.S. South has been acknowledged to be a microcosm of global souths shaped by multicultural communities and transformed into a global space through border crossings, liminality, and transnational turns, which inevitably led to incredible changes in the field of southern literature. New studies and global movements have given way to multiculturalism that recognizes the Caribbean, Asian, Hispanic, African, and indigenous presence in the South. Multiculturalism ends the black/white and North/ South binaries leaving the age of southern exceptionalism in the past. Through its protagonist Ella Townsend’s anthropological study, Erna Brodber’s novel Louisiana (1994) aims to discover the commonalities between the U.S. South and the circumCaribbean and thus create a syncretic southern space that embraces transnational identities and multicultural community. Louisiana as a setting presents hybrid and liminal spaces that depict commonalities between the U.S. South and the Caribbean. This paper’s theoretical concept is based on Homi Bhabha’s critical concepts of hybridity and liminality explained in his collection of essays on Colonial Theory, The Location of Culture. Within this context, this paper aims to discuss the relationship between the U.S South and the Caribbean and how these relations define cultural hybridity and identity formation in Louisiana.