| Summary: | This thesis examines the ways in which migrant autobiographers produce the
experience of migration and the histories attached to it for a diversified Canadian
audience. In this study, I explore the type of knowledge that migrant autobiographies
create and suggest interpretive structures that demonstrate the social and political
relevance of these personal accounts of Canadian history.
I approach migrant autobiographies through theories of translation in order to
question the concepts of "sources," "origins" and "authenticity" that these texts raise.
Mobilizing the idea of translation for this study destabilizes the notion of "sources" or
"origins" and complicates the "originality" or "authenticity" often attributed to them.
Using this framework of translation invites a focus on the dynamic processes of
transferring experience and memory from one context to another, manipulating language
in certain ways to do so, and brings to the foreground the problems that these processes
reveal.
Chapter One examines the processes of linguistic translation that language
migrants engage in and the strategies that they develop to cope with the identity
translation that goes hand in hand with the manipulation of a foreign language. Chapter
Two focuses on cultural translation and explores how the textual strategies used in
migrant autobiography question and complicate common assumptions about the
"originality" and legitimacy of cultural models. Chapter Three examines the strategies
that the writers of family memoirs develop to translate their relatives' personal memories
into a historical narrative that recreates the family history and the complex power relations involved in these processes of historical reconstruction. Chapter Four focuses on
the concept of "home" and the functions that migrant writers attribute to their textual
creations of homes and homelands. The chapter also translates these writers' textual
representations of home into a form of critical discourse that examines the functions of
patriotic discourses and the shaping of national identities. === Arts, Faculty of === English, Department of === Graduate
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