The Grammar of Contested Memory: The Representation of Exile in Selected Female-Authored Texts of Diaspora

Abstract

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, in his Millennium: History of the Last Thousand Years (1995), has written, “If cultures and civilizations are the tectonic plates of world history, frontiers are the places where they scrape against each other and cause convulsive change” (20). One of the prognoses for our new century is that it will bear witness to more displacements, diasporas, migrations, movements of populations both voluntary and unsought, and often, surely, the mixture of the two, than any other period in recorded human history. Such movements inevitably involve borders and frontiers: national, those often arbitrary, and hardly inviolable, lines of political function, if not creation. Ideological borders, linguistic ones, borders of cultural norms and expectations. The borders between a before and an after, between a loss and its content, a gain and its antecedent. Borders— both excisions and those navigated, negotiated spaces—carried within. Many scholars across disciplines today work with Border Theory, that many-pronged consideration of boundaries and how we define them, insert ourselves within them, attempt to push them out or even obliterate them entirely, cross them, and cross back in an ongoing journey along, across, over, through the multiple borders that mark the forms in which we live our lives.