When I first began thinking about how my literary research interests could develop into potential topics for my senior thesis, I knew, broadly, that I wanted to focus on Latin American/U.S. Latinx literature. My desire to pursue this led to coursework on U.S. Latina/o Literature and further research on Latin American/Latinx literary traditions. As I read, I became aware of the scholarly focus predominantly on Mexico and the Caribbean (notably, Puerto Rico and Cuba) when discussing Latinxs. My specific interest in Central America and El Salvador has meant further refining my focus to search for these keywords within my findings on Latin American/Latinx literatures. Due to limited literary scholarship on Central American literatures, I maintain this broader category of Latin American/Latinx literatures as critical keywords––however, I aim to complicate this pan-ethnic category by also recognizing how it has dwelled on particular national narratives over others. I also aim to understand the role of Salvadoran literature within the two broader categories of Central American literature and Latin American/Latinx literatures.
As I have begun to focus more closely on Salvadoran literature, one of the binaries that emerged was writings of homeland versus writings of diaspora. These became keywords that I had identified as the two main groups of Salvadoran writings. What I came to realize later on, however, were the temporal attachments that I had begun to associate with each ‘branch’ of writing. I imposed a temporal restriction on writings of homeland as limited to pre-civil war, and writings of diaspora as strictly post-civil war. My interest in the civil war’s sociopolitical significance (including events leading up to the war and its aftermath) in shaping twentieth century Salvadoran literature led me to ignore the possibility of ‘diaspora’ before the war as well as to ignore the continuation of ‘homeland’ writings in the post-war area. As stated in Writing Analytically, “when you find a binary opposition in an essay, film, political campaign, or anything else, you have located the argument that the film, essay, or campaign is having with itself, the place where something is at issue,” (95). The binary opposition that I had identified revealed the tension in negotiating what happens to narratives and literatures when they inhabit different physical and temporal spaces. Specifically, the question that emerged was: what does Salvadoran literature look like at origin versus beyond the homeland, in ‘diaspora’?
I want to complicate ‘diaspora’ as a guiding keyword by thinking about how else we might refer to the experiences of people of Salvadoran origin living in the U.S. This is relevant to my literary research because these keywords will help me to select theoretical approaches. Some key terminology related to but distinct from ‘diaspora’ that come to mind are: immigrant, migrant, forced migration, exile, refugee. Many of these terms carry different political implications that affect the critical framing and context of how I will approach my discussion of Salvadoran literature.
Searching for definitions is useful here in gaining a better grip of what the terms specifically mean; for example, considering the differences between ‘migration’ and ‘immigration,’ in which the former refers broadly to movement across space and the latter implies a permanent move. While diaspora is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the state or fact of having been dispersed from one’s homeland or point of origin,” there is not necessarily a political implication in this term. On the other hand, ‘exile’ and ‘refugee’ have more political significances; exile is defined as “prolonged absence from one’s native country or a place regarded as home, endured by force of circumstances or voluntarily undergone for some purpose. Also: an instance or period of this.” The OED definition of a refugee is “a person who has been forced to leave his or her home and seek refuge elsewhere, esp. in a foreign country, from war, religious persecution, political troubles, the effects of a natural disaster, etc.; a displaced person.” Considering the sociopolitical significances of these terms will enable a better analysis of my literary scope and raise specific questions for the primary texts I will consider. For example, one of the leading contemporary Salvadoran writers is Horacio Castellanos Moya, who has spent most of his life away from El Salvador, in exile. Does Castellanos Moya belong to homeland or to ‘diaspora’? Is ‘diaspora’ an appropriate word to use when we are referring to circumstances of forced migration? What do these literary texts gain or lose from being referred to as belonging to ‘diaspora’ to ‘homeland’ or to literature of ‘exile’/’refugee’ writing?
Bibliography:
“Diaspora.” “Immigration.” “Latino, Latina, Latin@.” “Migration,” Keywords for American Cultural Studies. New York: NYU Press, 2007.
“diaspora, n.” “exile, n.1.” “refugee, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2017.
David Rossenwasser and Jill Stephen. Writing Analytically, 6th ed. Boston: Wadsworth Publishing, 2011.
Your thesis topic is a great example of keywords being biased by themselves; you have already identified that you have to challenge the keywords you use to conduct research, even as you rely on them to identify sources. It sounds like you have already significantly narrowed down your interests to define the parameters of your research, which is quite an achievement. I also appreciate that you are already critiquing the definitions of your keywords and (perhaps?) creating ones yourself that better express the sociopolitical states you’re talking about?
Janel, this blog post is great! I personally benefited from reading about your thought process and the ways in which you have worked to narrow your focus, and it seems that you have a clear idea of what you want to write about moving forward. I think that you make an excellent point in stating that words such as “diaspora” can have a variety of meanings and that it will be beneficial to outline a specific definition of this and other complex terms. I also find your idea of both questioning and outlining the consequences of classifying these texts into either literature of the ‘diaspora’ or ‘homeland’ to be fascinating and one that is worth further inquiry. It seems that you are also making an overarching argument for the lack of Salvadorian works in the cannon- they clearly offer significant contributions to the literary world that you will analyze within your thesis, so perhaps this is something that you can explore later on! Overall, great post and I look forward to reading your first draft soon!