Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Helen Oyeyemi And Border Identities: Contesting Western Representations Of Immigrants Through Transnational Literature, Susanna L. Mills

Student Publications

Oyeyemi is a Nigerian-British writer whose writing, like other immigrant authors', participates in a dialogue about and contestation of essentialized immigrant and ethnic identities that are a result of global and local processes. Her writing produces counter-narratives in which immigrant identities are multiple, conflicting, intersectional, and most of all self-represented. This paper explores readings of Oyeyemi accompanied by the following: an examination of globalization and flows of migration; the connections of national epistemologies through media to processes like migration: how literary canon has excluded transnational fiction from the mainstream, thereby decreasing the ability of multi-ethnic and im/migrant writers to represent …