Women writing home: the migrant short story in North America, 1980-2020

This thesis explores contemporary short fiction by first- and second-generation migrant women writers in North America from 1980 to 2020, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Jamaica Kincaid, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Shani Mootoo amongst others. To date, scholarly attention has concentrated on the novel as the default migrant fictional genre and has often read migrant writing as a sociological mirror to our contemporary ‘Age of Migration’. This thesis contends that only by expanding our definitions of the short story, citizenry and the nation, by stretching the parameters of short story theory, and by emphasizing form alongside theme, can we fully appreciate migrant women’s consequential contributions to the contemporary short story in North America.

To respond fully to the polyphony that is characteristic of this writing, I deploy the lens of “habitability”. Interweaving short story theory and feminist postcolonial studies, my research investigates how stories by migrant women problematize migration through domestic spaces and objects, through what I call the “poetics of home”. Through chapters scrutinizing the roles and representations of language, food and clothes in these texts, I argue that the concern with home and belonging is evident both in the thematic focus and in the formal choices that migrant women make. The selected writers accommodate the hybridity and fragmentation of their experiences of diaspora and, in so doing, they ‘domesticate’ the short story genre and make it a literary home of their own; they make the short story a ‘habitable’ genre. This study thus contributes to a reappraisal of women’s writing the quotidian and of short fiction in the contemporary canon of migrant literature. In the process, it presents the short story as an international and migrant genre which transcends national borders and is easily disseminated via the globalised publishing industry and the online space.