Allan, MichaelSturgis O'Coyne, Laurel2024-01-092024-01-092024-01-09https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29191Well into the late-twentieth century, monolingualism persists as an organizing principle for national community even as the intrinsic multilingualism of the Americas nourishes interconnected histories and political imaginaries. My dissertation—'Here is the Story’: Weaving Kinship in Hemispheric American Literatures—is a comparative study of a transnational and multilingual Americas. Across three chapters, I compare three authors’ works in which narrations of kinship unsettle a monolingual imaginary and disrupt settler colonial patrimonies. I explore English interlaced with Nahuatl and Spanish in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987); French woven with Antillean Créole in Gisèle Pineau’s L’Exil selon Julia (1996); and English-language narration imbued with Laguna Pueblo language and cosmologies in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977). The features of these multilingual texts imagine interrelated histories among hemispheric American languages, cultures, and ecologies and at once articulate differing shapes of kinship: a linear shape in Anzaldúa’s invocation of hybrid Aztec (Nahua) and Spanish ancestry; a networked, rhizomatic shape evoking eco-feminist relationality in the Creolized French of Pineau’s memorial novel; and multi-scalar webs of matter-energy wovenness in Silko’s narrative that produce a spiraling shape of kinship inclusive of more-than-human relations and nonlinear temporalities. This project centers on a study of language and epistemology through which I analyze postcolonial and decolonial modes of affiliation in familial, political, historical, and ecological imaginaries, and which ultimately promotes a practice of comparison that asserts hemispheric literariness in terms of epistemological (re)weavings of self, ancestry, and place.en-USAll Rights Reserved.Decolonial feminist theoriesEco-criticism and Environmental LiteraturesFeminist MaterialismHemispheric AmericanTranslation studiesWomen and Gender studiesElectronic Thesis or Dissertation