Rescaling Dissent in Some Transnational Stories: Some Speculative Narratives by Mootoo, Selvadurai, Chariandy and Díaz

Abstract

espanol Este articulo interpreta el modo en que escritores transnacionales usan lo gotico para investigar los conceptos de tiempo, espacio y memoria cultural de sus ancestros que hoy pareciera extrana debido a la transterritorializacion que sufren. Este legado aparece en forma de la huella que resulta de la migracion diasporica y el extranamiento que persigue a los protagonistas de estos relatos. Este ensayo revisa las nociones de identidad cultural y la naturaleza cambiante de la narrativa diasporica de los ultimos treinta anos. Intentaremos analizar algunos relatos transnacionales que llamaremos hemisfericos y que tienen similitud en el Canada sudasiatico y el Caribe por diferentes razones politicas y traumaticas, en su representacion cinematica del espacio domestico y en las fronteras fisicas y psicologicas que nos encadenan a los recuerdos de nuestros antepasados. EnglishThis paper interprets the way in which transnational writers use the Gothic to investigate concepts like time, space and cultural memory in their ancestors’ culture which nowadays appears foreign to them due to the transterritorialization they suffer. This legacy appears in the form of unresolved memory traces resulting from diasporic migration and is readily figured as an ostranenie which haunts the characters of some South Asian-Canadian or Caribbean storytelling from within and without. The argument involves a revision of the notions of cultural identity and the changing nature of diasporic writing in the last thirty years. This essay tries to analyse these transnational stories which we will call hemispheric and which bear some resemblance in diasporic writing, for different political and traumatic reasons, in their cinematic deployment of the homeSpace horror, childhood memories and physical and psychological boundaries which chain us to our ancestors’ memories.