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

Abstract

I offer a reading of the opening chapter of Julia Alvarez’s novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) through Bill Ashcroft’s approach to “transcultural presence.” I argue that Alvarez’s opening chapter casts the experience of transcultural presence as a complex and conflicted emotional space that challenges the reader’s appreciation of belonging beyond received interpretative frameworks. I further draw on Sten Pulz Moslund’s theoretical engagement with the “presencing” of place through a “topopoetic mode of reading.” I propose that the presencing of place in the opening chapter of Alvarez’s novel encourages a located, embodied way of reading transformative moments of transcultural presence. Finally, I suggest that Alvarez’s ethics of postcolonial, transcultural writing encourages what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has referred to as “reparative reading.” “Reparative reading” is illustrated in terms of the literary text’s opening up toward the “volume” of transcultural complexity, an opening up that calls for self-reflexive interpretative caution and care for locative particularity when engaging with transcultural literature.