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“We Developed Solidarity”: Family, Race, Identity, And Space-Time In Recent Multiethnic U.S. American Fiction, Kimber L. Wiggs

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In Diversity in Families, sociologists Maxine Baca Zinn, D. Stanley Eitzen, and Barbara Wells assert, “At a very personal level, families are crucial shapers of who we are and what our opportunities have been and will be” (xvii). The novels in this dissertation—Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997), and Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 (2009)—examine the role of family in the development of individual identity and the practice of social justice. These authors foreground characters from various ethnic backgrounds and depict how the characters form new, multiethnic families. My dissertation explores the …