Fragmented Identities: Migration and the Quest for Belonging in Contemporary Diasporic Narratives

This paper explores the complex intersections of displacement, gender, and identity through a comparative analysis of Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s short story “Clothes.” This research investigates how migrant people negotiate the emotional and sociocultural terrain of belonging and alienation in host nations. Drawing on theoretical frameworks such as Iain Chambers’ concept of migrancy and Homi Bhabha’s vernacular cosmopolitanism, the paper highlights how diasporic subjects confront and reconfigure notions of selfhood in transnational contexts. Alvarez’s García sisters and Divakaruni’s Sumita embody the struggles and possibilities of hybrid identity formation, caught between the pressures of assimilation and the pull of cultural memory. Both narratives reveal how diasporic women endure dual marginalizations—based on race, gender, and geography—yet assert agency through acts of cultural negotiation, resistance, and self-fashioning. The analysis underscores that identity in the diaspora is not a fixed essence but a fluid, fractured, and evolving construct shaped by displacement, trauma, and adaptation.