ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5878-5911
Subject Area
Language and Literature, English and American
Abstract
Mastering Narratives: Trauma and Identity in American Ethnic Fiction explores the relationship between master narratives of American history and identity and literary representations of traumatic experience in twentieth-century and contemporary United States literature by ethnic women writers. Using close readings and narratological analyses informed by trauma studies, critical ethnic studies, and gender studies, I examine how literary works articulate the ongoing and accumulating traumatic consequences of cultural narratives about American identity. My analysis examines how master narratives are rooted in social and historical contexts and are productive in themselves, discursive forms of power that structure collective identities and individual subjectivities. Throughout the dissertation, I argue for a capacious understanding of trauma, positioning trauma as being rooted in the effect of traumatic experiences, rather than in the specific nature of the traumatic experience. In this way, my dissertation examines how contemporary literary works articulate the ongoing insidiously trauma of American histories of racialized and gendered oppression.
Chapter one, through its analysis of Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998), and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998), provides a new reading of rememory, arguing that each novel reveals the potential traumatizing consequences of witnessing traumatic histories to the next generation. I examine how the continued oral transmission of intergenerational traumas of enslavement and racial oppression inadvertently work to reinscribe the sexual and social logics of slavery on younger generations. Chapter two focuses on Emma Pérez’s Forgetting the Alamo (2009) and Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero (1996) to consider how Chicana historical fiction attempts to provide a counter-narrative to the Texas mythology that positions nineteenth-century Anglo Texan rebels as heroes and Mexicans and Tejanos as villains. Through a particular focus on both novel’s narrators, I argue that Forgetting articulates a decolonial approach to cultural trauma while Caballero’s narrator’s historical and omniscient perspective subverts its own rhetorical framing of the Mexican American War. Chapter three examines how two Native American novels, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) and Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008) reveal the ways in which the traumas of wartime—and the associated internalization of master narratives about ideal American gender and sexuality—shapes gendered performance. I argue that both novels use American warfare as a frame through which to dramatize the ongoing traumatic effects of United States settler colonialism. Finally, chapter four turns to contemporary Asian American fiction to consider how Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers (2022) and Rachel Khong’s Real Americans (2024) use speculative fiction elements to reveal how master narratives of American identity position past traumatic experiences as being inherently unamerican.
Degree Date
Summer 2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
English
Advisor
Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue
Second Advisor
Samantha Pergadia
Third Advisor
Christopher González
Fourth Advisor
Stella Setka
Number of Pages
301
Format
.docx
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Barber, Ally, "Mastering Narratives: Trauma and Identity in American Ethnic Fiction" (2026). English Theses and Dissertations. 25.
https://scholar.smu.edu/hum_sci_english_etds/25
Included in
American Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Gender and Sexuality Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Race and Ethnicity Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons
