The mother(land) through narrative and nostalgia : the role stories play in the crafting of imagined (exiled) communities
Comprising three novellas and critical research, this project defines and examines the possibilities of creative writing to expound upon and provide insight into issues of citizenship, belonging and memory. This interplay of narratives (creative and critical) speaks to the complex and intertextual nature of my research and is reminiscent of bricolage, defined by Matt Rogers as a 'multi-perspectival, multi-theoretical and multi-methodological approach to inquiry […] based on notions of eclecticism, emergent design, flexibility and plurality'. My thesis makes use of autobiography as case study and creative practice as research to illuminate the personal experiences of mothers and daughters separated by global movement and to study the role that the mother's storytelling plays in fostering the daughter's nostalgia for home and quest for belonging. By conducting interviews with my mother and utilising my own personal experiences as an exiled daughter to inform both my critical research and my ficto-autobiographical novellas, I have been able to draw more widely-applicable insights into the process of self-fashioning. This autoethnographical methodology bridges the gap between the personal and the public, and in the words of Heewon Chang 'transcends mere narration of self to engage in cultural analysis and interpretation'.
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