Performing heteroglossia: contesting "war bride" discourses, exploring "histories of kokoro" with four senryu writers

My thesis explores the diasporic memories and poetic practices of four “Japanese war brides” in the state of Washington, U.S.A. My analysis is based on a two-month ethnographic study where I focused on their poetic practices called senryu. Based on a Bakhtinian analysis of “heteroglossic utterances” I theorize the writers as heteroglossic subjects who performatively move between “culturally different” discursive spaces, each of which has a set of power-relations and a set of discourses that organize it. When the writers tell their experiences in the discursive space of senryu, I argue, these stories disturb their identity determined by the dominant “war bride” discourses. In my thesis, I re-tell the stories the writers shared with me during my interviews with them. By bringing together their individual voices, I attempt to show how they together generate new accounts about their transnational experiences and their diasporic, multi-voiced sense of home and identities.