Migrant women, place and identity in contemporary women’s writing

Abstract

While recent scholarship on migration has reflected growing attention to gender and to the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality, there has been little focus on women’s emotional and bodily responses to migration in the context of larger structures of sexism, racism and the legacies of colonialism. In this paper, I examine some literary portrayals of how migrant women’s relationships with specific places of origin and settlement, both steeped in structural relationships of unequal power and experienced on an immediate, psychological and bodily plane, are fundamental to migrant women’s changing sense of belonging and identity. Jamaica Kincaid in her novel Lucy, Tsitsi Dangarembga in her novel Nervous Conditions and Dionne Brand in the opening poems of her volume No Language is Neutral evoke some of the complex ways in which migration can affect women’s lives and identities, thus both complementing and critiquing some contemporary theorisations of migration and migrant identities.

Keywords:

• intersectionality
• women
• migration
• place
• embodiment
• literature

Notes

^1. Studies in ‘literary geography’ at the turn of the twentieth century examined particular landscapes’ influence on literary works; more recently, scholars have explored the multiple meanings of literary representations of place (see Tindall 1991; Johnson 2000). Matley (1987) gives a useful overview of trends from the 1880s to the 1980s.

^2. See for example Massey (1994), Davidson and Bondi (2004).

^3. Mohanty (1987) built explicitly on Rich’s ideas; see also Kaplan (1994), Rowe (2005) and others.

^4. Though arguing a somewhat different point, Smith and Katz write that there is a tendency for spatial metaphors, such as location, position and locality, ‘to become virtually free-floating abstractions, the source of their grounding unacknowledged’ (1993, 80).

^5. Barbara Bender writes of ‘a tendency to assume that a rooted, familiar sense of place requires staying put’; she cites a study of nomadic communities in Mongolia, for whom there is ‘an ego-centred world in which the “centre” moves’, and points out that for contemporary Roma, the caravan, whether on the move or temporarily stationed, is ‘home’ (Bender and Winer 2001, 7).

^6. The Shona people are Zimbabwe’s majority ethnic group, comprising about 70% of the population.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sharon Krummel

SHARON KRUMMEL is Co-ordinating Officer of the Sussex Centre for Migration Research and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, University of Sussex.