Migration and Diaspora: An Intersectional Feminist Reading of Lucy by Jamacia Kincaid.

This thesis explores how migration and diaspora shape the intersectional experience of Black women through a close reading of Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy. Drawing on Black feminist thought, I make a case using analytical and theoretical frameworks to expand intersectionality to account for global movement and memory. Intersectionality must move beyond national borders to account for how power travels with people. I argue that migration works externally through movement and displacement, and diaspora works internally through memory. There is a location in the United States, but there is always a look back through memory and the two conflict. Lucy's migration from the Caribbean to the United States brings her into contact with new racial and gender hierarchies. At the same time, her memories of home continue to shape how she sees herself. Rather than viewing migration as a one-way shift or diaspora as nostalgia, I present both as active forces that complicate identity. It positions Lucy's story as evidence that the intersections of race, gender, and class cannot be fully understood without considering the influence of movement and memory. I propose a framework of global intersectionality that incorporates the destabilizing effects of transnational movement and diasporic memory into intersectional feminist analysis.