Diasporic Approaches to "Home" and Family in Dionne Brand's What We All Long For and Madeleine Thien's Certainty

Abstract

<p>This thesis investigates the first and second diasporic generations' approaches to "home" as represented in Dionne Brand's <em>What We All Long For</em> and Madeleine Thien's <em>Certainty</em>. Brand and Thien offer nuanced and counter-intuitive conceptualizations of "home" that emerge in the house, city, and world at large. The authors demonstrate how one's achievement of "home" does not only entail a negotiation of these spaces, but also of familial relations. This thesis argues that the first generation's "diaspora consciousness" is a trait that the second generation inherits and transforms. This second generation exhibits more of a "transnational consciousness," a term that this thesis offers to describe the nomadic lifestyle of the second-generation characters.</p>