A representação da identidade de fronteira em Samba Dreamers, de Kathleen de Azevedo, e Ocotillo Dreams, de Melinda Palacio: uma análise sob lentes dialógicas

Abstract

The conception of the United States of America as a land of wealth and opportunity made the country a destination for immigrants from all over the world, generating diverse communities, as well as literary communities. Considering that the literature science establishes a close relationship with the cultural and social history (BAKHTIN, 2017), we analyze two works from the North American contemporary literature of minority groups, viz., the novels Samba Dreamers (2006), written by the Brazilian-American author Kathleen de Azevedo, and Ocotillo Dreams (2011), by the Mexican-American author Melinda Palacio, through the studies of the Bakhtin Circle (Bakhtin, Volóchinov and Medviédev). We confront the process of identity formation of the characters and observe the representation of the border in the work's architecture (BAKHTIN, 2002). The methodology of this bibliographic research is supported by the sociological analysis proposed by Voloshinov (2019) and Bakhtin (2015), in which the analysis starts from the pure verbal essence towards its social significance in the concrete context of the works. Besides the theoretical discussion about identities and borderlands, the results of this comparative/dialogical study evidenced the characters’ identity formation in the experience of a linguistic border, through code-switching, a gender border, represented by the active and dialogical responses of the characters when facing exoticization, and an ancestry border, a dialogic clash between authoritative and internally persuasive discourse, regarding the relationship with their mothers. Such results bring contributions not only to the critical fortune of the works, but also to the social discussions they raise, in addition to the studies of dialogism and literary analysis.