Home Stories: Displacement, Domestic Labor, and Narrative in California, 1848-2007 (Dissertation)

Abstract

“Home Stories” looks at how stories about domestic labor define land rights in the context of racialized displacement in California. California’s histories of displacement include genocidal violence against Native Californians, freeway building and urban renewal, and the early twenty-first century foreclosure crisis. Displacement often violates communal home spaces such as tribal lands and neighborhoods by pushing people into dispersed, interchangeable units assigned to nuclear families, thereby privatizing and intensifying domestic labor for the sake of profit.

While literary scholars have done extensive work on how domestic ideologies reproduce settler-colonial, racialized space, domestic workers engage with these ideologies in very different ways. Domestic labor can be exploited in order to support settler-colonial and profitable spatial production; however, it can also rely on, return to, and reconfigure communal and countercultural spaces. The texts within each chapter share similar formal representations of domestic labor: as private support for manifesting borders in John Rollin Ridge’s The Adventures of Joaquín Murieta and Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance; as haphazard claims to white property in Helen Hunt Jackson’s "Ramona" and the work of Joan Didion; as gathering in the autobiographies of Lucy Young and Delfina Cuero; as a triple shift of housework, paid work, and activism in Anna Deavere Smith’s "Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992" and the 2006 film "Maquilapolis"; and as intimacy Héctor Tobar’s "The Barbarian Nurseries" and Karen Tei Yamashita’s "I Hotel." The project shows how these forms of domestic labor respond to racialized histories of displacement, thereby expanding the scope of domestic fiction in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature.

In doing this comparison and translating divergent experiences of displacement through the concept of domestic labor, I hope to map out what coalitional, everyday practices of homemaking might look like, rather than simply trace historical fights over land as an object to be owned as property. Such coalitional practices would negotiate between culturally-specific forms of domestic labor tied to one place — for example, tribal gathering practices, unpaid privatized housework, and community building — in order to reformulate property rights as equitable but different rights to presence, mobility, social reproduction, religious practice, and ecological management.

Keywords: California, domestic labor, race, space, geography, displacement, women and gender studies, American literature, domestic fiction