Book Description

This thesis includes a detailed analysis of Isabel Allende's (b.1942) fiction and memoirs about California and will consider the degree to which Allende's work engages with American identity, the United States' national narrative, and spaces of citizenship. Born in Peru to a family of Chilean diplomats and now a U.S. citizen, Isabel Allende has long been involved in the complex networks of power relations and conflicting narratives in the broader context of the Americas. Since immigrating to California in 1988, her work has dealt largely with the United States' imperial relationship to the rest of the Americas, American identity and multicultural sites of interdependent belonging within California. In this thesis, I will focus on how Allende's fiction and memoirs in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century become a testament to her model of a fluid nation where she reconciles the apparent contradictions between allegiance to political states and subjective versions of belonging within California's past, present, and future. In doing so, I will show that Allende's work demands a radical transformation of societal frameworks through revised notions of place, temporality, and space. -- I argue that Allende represents U.S. citizenship and American identity as a transitional agent in the formation of national belonging. Her work envisages recognition of affective engagement as a crucial aspect of belonging within nation in order to restore an understanding of fluid borders and imagined national identities based on interdependency. I suggest that by emphasizing the patriarchal nationalisms of contemporary U.S. society, Allende posits a distinct "feminist" nation as a crucial paradigm able to overcome delusions of hegemonic societal and political frameworks. I then focus on how Allende rewrites California's history to reconcile being an "American" within the Americas.