Showcasing Giannina Braschi's novel Yo-Yo Boing! (1998) and Etel Adnan's In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005) as representative of a leading-edge imaginative force, I explore how migrant women writers create for themselves a new position within the arena of the contemporary U.S. cultural production and social agency. For them, migrancy, and its consequent existential form of metalives, necessitates multiple positionality that, in turn, produces multiple reflexive modalities. Sharing an understanding that mimesis itself is a form of displacement, these authors create alternative aesthetic states inhabited by characters who experience synchronously multiple placedness in the world. From their gendered and migrant perspectives, their particular aesthetic means enhance, enlarge, and elucidate the capacities and the conditions of postmodern subjectivity. Furthermore, they ground their aesthetics in the women's bodies. As a habitation and the site of negotiations with the self, the body is not only a locus and an apparatus of individual enunciation but it becomes a chronotope of their novels. Granted that migration alters one's psychogeographic orientations, their spatial reconfigurations of the embodied self produce rhetorically, structurally, and imaginatively innovative narratives which mark not only the U.S. but also the global fiction production in remarkable ways. © Common Ground, Ljudmila Mila Popovich, All Rights Reserved.

Feminine aesthetics Migrations Contemporary American literature Narrative innovations Women's writing Migrant women writers Metafiction

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