PANEL 19
Transnational Identities
Room 9207
Colonial Postcolonial Dilemma:
Transculturation and the Puerto Rican Identity in
Felices Días Tío Sergio by Magali García Ramis
Ivan Hernández Torres – Florida Atlantic University
The colonial discourse intends to create a binary opposition between colonized and
colonizer that seeks to eradicate the colonized’s culture, replacing it with the colonizer’s reality.
Such rhetoric seeks to establish a position of subjugation, on the part of the colonized, where an
hegemonic discourse establishes and presents an identity and vision of the colonized people to the
world. The population of Puerto Rico has been subjected to such discourse for more than 500 years,
starting in 1492 with the invasion of Spain and then, from 1898 until present times, on behalf of the
United States of America.
This long period of existing as a colony, under the influence of two linguistically and
historically diverse world powers, increases the crisis of identity in the Puerto Rican psyche. Having
been subjected to two processes of transculturation that seek to prevent the creation of an
independent Puerto Rican cultural identity, such identity has developed as a mélange of the
previous and the current cultural impositions forcing the Puerto Rican to live in between two
foreign realities and seeking to make them their own.
This is the dilemma that is shown by Magali García Ramis in Felices días tío Sergio. By
situating the novel in the 1950, times of the creation of the “Estado Libre Asociado”, term created
to legitimize the U.S.A - Puerto Rico colonial situation in the Twentieth Century, García Ramis
portrays the colonial postcolonial reality of the 1950’s Puerto Rican; a reality that is current and
valid in today’s Puerto Rico. We study the main character, Lydia, and how her relationships and
experiences show the confusion and negotiation involved in the creation of a Puerto Rican identity,
an identity that requires the character to live in between two worlds without ever being altogether
part of any of them.
Homeless at Heart
Yasmina Fawaz – University of Texas at Austin
The theme of homelessness permeates both Henri Lopes’ Le Lys et le Flamboyant and Marie
N’Diaye’s En Famille. The novels’ narrators are both affected by what can be qualified as
homelessness. While they both possess access to a private dwelling, they remain excluded from the
world they live in, always conscious of a part of them that remains separate. Their homelessness is
located in their identities and is manifested through their bodies, symbols of their transgression.
Marie N’Diaye and Henri Lopes offer a challenging outlook on cultural and racial identity.
In Le Lys et le Flamboyant Victor represents a permanent outsider, who unlike Kolélé, the
woman he bases his story on, is not sure of his place in his home environment. As he describes, in
the opening chapters, the uneasiness he feels during Kolélé’s funeral, the reader unveils the source
of Victor’s constant marginalization. As a mixed race individual, claiming Chinese, Congolese, and
European heritage, the narrator does not only identify with Congo as a homeland but instead exists
and embraces France as a second home.
N’Diaye’s heroine Fanny is also subject to a strong sense of discomfort towards her family
and the place of the “ancestor,” a term she uses to refer to her grand-mother. Fanny launches herself
into a quest to find the missing piece of her identity which she believes to be lye with her aunt Leda.
Scholars such as Glissant, Hartman and Ahmed engage with the challenges that this text offers
regarding the construction of identity from a transnational standpoint. This paper explores the ways
in which both narrators become homeless heroes, finding meaning in their travels and
communicating to the reader a new perspective with which to view the world and what it means to
belong.
In Transition: from the Realist to the Modernist across the Atlantic
Elizabeth Lenn – Graduate Center (CUNY)
By approaching two very different authors, this essay will interrogate the assumptions made
when approaching a classically considered “realist” writer with their modernist works, specifically
their works that clearly show a transition between the realist genre and modernist genre.
Fannie Hurst, an American writer thought of as a “sob-sister” writer, broke her own mold
with the writing of Lummox, the tale of working-class Bertha that takes on the modernist notions of
shifting narration, questions of temporality, and the collage aesthetic in the writing that mirror
Stein’s cubism and the collage aesthetic of the Harlem Renaissance. At the same time, she
maintains an activist approach in the writing and the book centers on New York’s lower east side in
a very realist imagination. In doing so, Hurst is able to subversively raise significant questions
about the labor, immigrant, and women’s movement.
Rudyard Kipling, securely fixed in a realist canon, and writing from the other side of the
Atlantic, introduces a modern regime in his short story, Mary Postage. The ambiguous
characterizations, manipulation of thought and language, and automation and queering of the
protagonist beg a modernist label to a work that is very fixed in the realism of World War I. Thus,
Kipling introduces a new narrative voice that forces the reader to re-consider the realities of the war
and the people living (and dying) in the war.
By using two very different authors, the aim of the essay is to interrogate the commonalities
found when viewing two authors in transition. Their literary and biographical histories aside, what
is the effect of the realist transition to modernism, specifically consider the activist and political
edges of their works?
Crossing the Bridge between Sudan and the U.S.: Human Rights and Cultural Translation
in Dave Eggers’s What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng
Anke Geertsma – Graduate Center (CUNY)
In this paper, I will analyze Dave Eggers’s What is the What: The Autobiography of
Valentino Achak Deng, a Novel (2006) as a cultural translation of a specific, local human rights
violation into the dominant Western discourse of human rights. Describing the life of this Sudanese
“Lost Boy,” the main objective of the book is to raise awareness and resources for the Valentino
Achak Deng (VAD) foundation, founded after (and thanks to) the publication of the book. Pertinent
issues for discussion include the collaboration between an established American author and a
Sudanese refugee, fictionalization and the categorization of the book as a novel (rather than a
memoir or biography), and the de-contextualization of a specific experience.
I will point out that Eggers consciously operates within the conventions of human rights and
the dominant (Western) discourse that accompanies it in order to increase the effect the book will
have on the real situation (in Sudan). He uses fictional strategies and stylistic “embellishments” to
increase the book’s potential to elicit an affective reader response. Yet, at the same time he evades
criticism on issues of truthfulness and authorship by labeling the book as a novel. All the while the
fictionalization and broadening of Deng’s incomplete memory profoundly affects the latter’s
identity and his role in the broader human rights project. I will argue that Valentino Achak Deng
comes to occupy a discursive and cultural space in-between Sudan and the U.S. His fictional
character becomes part of his public persona, and it is in this representational function (of all Lost
Boys or all victims of the Sudanese Second Civil War) that he carries out his work for the VAD
foundation. In short, it is through the project of What is the What that his identity is formed (by
himself and by cultural expectations) and performed (at fundraisers, lectures, and in his work for the
VAD foundation).