Abstract
I explore the role of the plural possessive pronoun “our” in two migrant we-narratives, Julie Otsuka’s “The Buddha in the Attic” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “We Need New Names,” in order to understand how migrant collectives function and operate in relation to what they possess as a unit or what they possess individually. The narrative in Otsuka’s novel is consistent with its use of “we” and does not allow for individual narration within the collective while Bulawayo’s novel continually switches back and forth between multiple “we” collectivities and the narrator’s individual narrative. Drawing from narrative theory and socio-psychological theories of collectivity, I argue that we-narratives are stable and consistent, such as in The Buddha in the Attic, when their use of “our” is followed by tangible, corporeal objects that are easily possessed and shared by all members of the collective. On the other hand, inconsistent we-narratives, such as We Need New Names, build their community foundations on non-shareable items, such as the concept of the nation, which cannot be owned or equally dispersed to result in unstable and fragile community belonging. While narrative scholarship largely focuses on the analysis of “we” in collective narration, it dismisses the importance of the possessive pronoun and its relation to the stability of the collective identity. By combining a quantitative analysis of the use of “our” in both novels and close-reading, I highlight the grammatical role of possessive pronouns on the composition of collective identity values.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Narrative theory, Nationhood, Migrant literature, Quantitive data interpretation
