Identity, Family, and Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Annie Liontas’s Let Me Explain You and Paola Corso’s Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories share a dialogic narrative model of identity constitution: Let Me Explain You employs narrative polymorphy in the form of narrative voices that speak of themselves both in first- and third-person, while Catina’s Haircut morphs into a novel out of eight (self-contained yet interdependent) stories. The narrative polymorphy of the two novels evidences a dynamic and relational sense of selfhood that is performed in and through their multilayered narrative structure. This bears witness to complex family patterns and practices of relating to collective memory and cultural heritage in the Greek American and Italian American communities. Let Me Explain You and Catina’s Haircut shed light on the forces of family history and cultural identity as they operate on the ethnic characters’ identity formation across Greek American and Italian American families.