On Transcultural Presence and Reparative Reading Practice: Rethinking Belonging and Transcultural Transformation in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Abstract

In his 2013 essay “Transcultural Presence,” Bill Ashcroft approaches the question of cultural encounter and transcultural transformation through the practice of reading cross-cultural literature. Ashcroft’s discussion draws on the philosophy of “presence” in order to chart a way of navigating the so-called “third-space” of transcultural transformation. Ashcroft’s proposed stance toward cross-cultural reading practice aims at apprehending the force of transformation articulated within the cross-cultural text that gestures beyond existing conceptual frameworks. At a time when mobility and new technologies are changing the way we appreciate the claims of community, forging new ways of thinking about group membership, citizenship, and belonging is becoming a structural and stra-tegic challenge. I offer a reading of the opening chapter of Julia Alvarez’s novel How the Garc (cid:2) ıa Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) through Ashcroft’s approach to “transcultural presence” and argue that Alvarez’s opening chapter casts transcultural experience as a complex and conflicted emotional space. In Alvarez’s text, the transcultural state of (un)belonging becomes an uncharted geography of affective responses to the silences and gaps of postcolonial history and to the confusion generated by unspoken legacies of complicity. At the same time, in Alvarez’s writing, transcultural presence also becomes a space recharged with re-generative energies that challenge the reader’s appreciation of belonging beyond received interpretative frameworks. To shed light on the articulation of transcultural presence in the first chapter of Alvarez’s How the Garc (cid:2) ıa Girls Lost Their Accents , I draw on Sten Pulzt Moslund’s theoretical engagement with the “presencing” of place through a “topopoetic mode of reading.” I trace a presencing of place in the opening chapter of Alvarez’s novel, which invites a reassessment of received