Ethnicity and identity in Canadian women's fantastic short fiction

• Autores: Allan Weiss
• Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / Gema Soledad Castillo García (ed. lit.), María Rosa Cabellos Castilla (ed. lit.), Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez (ed. lit.), Vincent Carlisle Espínola (ed. lit.), 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 1014-1027
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In recent years, Canadian fantastic literature has experienced dramatic growth in quantity, quality, and diversity. In the past two decades, new voices have emerged providing varied cultural and aesthetic approaches to the writing of what is known as genre fiction.

    Among those who have achieved prominence in the fields of fantasy and science fiction are women writers, including those belonging to minority ethnic groups. While employing familiar tropes, writers like Nalo Hopkinson, Hiromi Goto, and —though hardly a new writer— Phyllis Gotlieb, explore non-traditional ethnic identities in their short fiction, often by juxtaposing the myths of their own cultures with those of the majority culture. The result is an examination of the meaning of cultural identity in the defining of personal identity, and in some cases a feminist reinterpretation of identity itself.

    In looking at short stories by women who write out of minority cultural traditions, this paper explores how the portrayal of characters from those backgrounds raises profound questions about individual and gender identities. Non-white and non- Christian authors evoke new meanings of the word alien as they use elements of science fiction and fantasy to present the clash between their own cultural heritages and dominant cultural environments. Inevitably, these culture clashes imply far larger questions about how we define ourselves in terms of gender, self, and even what it means to be human.