Abstract

This workshop proposes to address the works of Lucy (1990) by Jamaica Kincaid and Breath Eyes Memory (1994) by Edwidge Danticat, natives of Antigua and Haiti respectively, in their narratives of growth (Bildungsroman). Both authors left their islands sometime during childhood, seeking better living conditions in the United States, reporting on different forms of trauma and violence. Danticat writes about an immigrant from the second generation of Haitians in New York who was first cared for by her aunt in Haiti, and then sent to her parents in the United States at the age of nine. Kincaid explores the experience of a teenager sent to a US family as an au pair in Manhattan to financially aid those she left on her island. Literature provides a window on these realities, and the analysis from this type of work allows us to deepen a set of reflections on the construction of the subjectivity of these subjects, in which conditioners such as gender, race, migratory status and class determine the opportunities of development and of humanity in face of the order of white supremacy in the United States.
As an analysis tool, the intersectional perspective is used, which allows a deeper understanding of how the conditioning factors are integrated and are co-formative with each other. This analysis is also informed by the black feminist theory, among them Bell Hooks, Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Barbara Smith. The experience of this growth creates a set of perceptions that questions both the inherited Caribbean identities and that of the American hegemony that receives them, deconstructing the myth of the American dream. Both are works that combine autobiography and fiction, expanding the limits of recounting this “coming of age” that differs from normative experience in the United States. 

Bibliography

Braziel, Jana Evans (2003), “Daffodils, Rhizomes, Migrations: Narrative Coming of Age in the Diasporic Writings of Edwidge Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid”, Meridians, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2003), pp. 110-131

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Bio Note 

Gonçalo Cholant is a PhD candidate in America Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. His research interests are African-American women's literature, Caribbean women's literature, trauma and violence representations, American Studies and Borderland Studies. He holds a MA in Feminist Studies from the same University. His undergrad studies were conducted at Universidade Federal de Pelotas, in Brazil, where he obtained an English Language and Literature degree.