This week’s update comes from OCH fellow Danielle Carlotti-Smith, who specializes in French and Francophone literature with a focus on Francophone Caribbean and New World studies, postcolonial studies, and migration studies. Her current book project examines literary expressions of the homeland in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French- and Spanish-Caribbean and Brazilian novels which are set on sugarcane plantations.
Frequently, when I’m out and about in Tulsa with my three- and seven-year-old daughters and we’re speaking French together, strangers will stop to ask me where I’m from. Invariably, I wonder to myself, “Does this person want to hang around long enough to hear the answer?” If they seem rushed, I provide this evasive response: “I used to be a French professor before we moved to Tulsa, so I’m teaching my kids French.” If they seem genuinely interested, I preface my longer answer with, “That’s a difficult question for me,” and then explain that my mother is Brazilian and my father is American, that I have dual citizenship, and that I was raised in five different countries before moving to the United States at the age of eighteen. What I don’t tell them is that my identity is hyphenated; it fluctuates depending on the context. There are times when I feel like a blend of both cultures, Brazilian and American; and there are also times when I feel like neither. And while I’m not French, I have dedicated twenty-six years of my life to studying the language, literature, and culture of France and its former colonies, so at times I feel more at home with French people than I do with anyone else.
I have been asked this question countless times throughout my entire life, but it still provokes a sense of discomfort each time. What may seem like a simple or even superficial question to most people, is really a very personal one for me; one that can’t just be answered in ten seconds in a grocery store line by providing a nationality, or even two; it can really only be answered through a larger narrative. Perhaps this is why I have always been drawn to literature: because a character’s identity is not offered for rapid consumption; rather, as readers we must slowly digest the events in a character’s life in order to try to get a sense of how his or her identity evolves in the course of the narrative. Many times, at the end of a novel we are left with loose ends and unanswered questions, and it is precisely for this reason that the characters seem more compelling and real.
This fall, I have been sharing my time between raising my daughters and teaching part time at the University of Tulsa. In my comparative literature course called “Beyond the Nation-State: Literature and Culture of Migration,” literature, historical narrative, essays, journalism, and film serve as vehicles for exploring questions of identity, integration, and acculturation. Focusing in particular on the theme of migration and the role it has played – and continues to play – in shaping societies and economies across the globe, my students and I are examining the ways in which national, cultural, social, literary, and cinematic boundaries are blurred, crossed, and contested in these works. In its own distinct manner, each of the novels and films we are studying illustrates the fluidity of national (or regional) borders and cultural identities through characters who negotiate among multiple cultural traditions, languages, and values.
Initially, some of my students expressed a sense of frustration with the open-endedness and lack of certainty they encountered in the material we read and viewed; even our short textbook on international migration seemed to cast doubt on the validity of the terminology and categories associated with migration. However, as we have worked together to delve deeper into the actual experiences of the real people and fictional characters we have encountered, they seem to have embraced nuance and complexity. Even as many of my students have been closely following media coverage of contemporary debates surrounding immigration in the United States (the U.S.-Mexico border wall, DACA, the travel bans, etc.), they have found that the novels in particular have added new layers of meaning to their interpretation of current events. This reading list includes fiction about the rural-urban migration of Indo-Caribbeans in Trinidad; Polish refugees in the rural U.S. South; Bengali (Indian) immigrants in New England; Ethiopian, Congolese, and Kenyan refugees in Washington, DC; and refugees escaping an unnamed conflict zone in the Middle East to another unspecified destination in the West.)
By questioning their own assumptions about migration along with representations in the media, the students have become cultural critics. In rejecting static or essentialist representations of culture and identity in favor of a more dynamic, complex, and humane vision, they have adopted a hyphenated worldview themselves. They also understand that in life and literature context matters a great deal.