Rescaling Dissent in Some Transnational Stories: Some Speculative Narratives by Mootoo, Selvadurai, Chariandy and Díaz

Abstract

This paper interprets the way in which transnational writers use the Gothic to investigate concepts like time, space and cultural memory in their ancestors’ culture which nowadays appears foreign to them due to the transterritorialization they suffer. This legacy appears in the form of unresolved memory traces resulting from diasporic migration and is readily figured as an ostranenie which haunts the characters of some South Asian-Canadian or Caribbean storytelling from within and without. The argument involves a revision of the notions of cultural identity and the changing nature of diasporic writing in the last thirty years. This essay tries to analyse these transnational stories which we will call hemispheric and which bear some resemblance in diasporic writing, for different political and traumatic reasons, in their cinematic deployment of the homeSpace horror, childhood memories and physical and psychological boundaries which chain us to our ancestors’ memories.

Keywords

• identity
• displacement
• memory
• hemispheric stories
• transnationalism
• diaspora
• canada
• the caribbean