'Here is the Story': Weaving Kinship in Hemispheric American Literatures

dc.contributor.advisorAllan, Michael
dc.contributor.authorSturgis O'Coyne, Laurel
dc.date.accessioned2024-01-09T22:52:28Z
dc.date.available2024-01-09T22:52:28Z
dc.date.issued2024-01-09
dc.description.abstractWell 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_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/29191
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Oregon
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserved.
dc.subjectDecolonial feminist theoriesen_US
dc.subjectEco-criticism and Environmental Literaturesen_US
dc.subjectFeminist Materialismen_US
dc.subjectHemispheric Americanen_US
dc.subjectTranslation studiesen_US
dc.subjectWomen and Gender studiesen_US
dc.title'Here is the Story': Weaving Kinship in Hemispheric American Literatures
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
thesis.degree.disciplineDepartment of Comparative Literature
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Oregon
thesis.degree.leveldoctoral
thesis.degree.namePh.D.

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