Transnational Allegories and the Non-national Subject in The Agüero Sisters and The Night Counter

Abstract

The stories of migration in the narratives that I have discussed in the previous three chapters underline three aspects of the non-national in contemporary narratives by American women of color. These aspects have revisited notions of unified national consciousness, linear national time, and a homogeneous sense of belonging to a singular national space. My analysis in the earlier chapters reveals a different sense of the nation that is formed beyond geographical boundaries and mediated by locating home(land) cognitively and spatially rather than solely perceived as a place of roots and belonging. That is to say, the non-national disrupts the idea of successive generations handing down the nation as if it is an invariant substance, inherited from one generation to the next. In addition, the non-national reconfigures the nation spatially as an open, un-confining space. This provokes a question about how to interpret the story of the nation in migrant narratives if the perception of the nation is not confined to national territories or geographical boundaries. In this chapter I analyze The Night Counter by Alia Yunis vis-à-vis The Agüero Sisters by Cristina Garcia to suggest reading these texts as national and transnational allegories and to pose a hypothesis about the non-national subject as a possible space for allegory.