Bilda familj: Om föräldralösa barn, släktskap och nationsskapande i samtida amerikanska romaner

Abstract

The article explores orphan children as central characters in a broad and multi-ethnic selection of contemporary US novels. It focuses on how the fictional orphan child carries culture-specific meanings related both to social history and literary history in the US, and demonstrates that meanings of orphanhood depend on dimensions of power, especially gender, race, class, and nationality. Such meanings are also connected to the particular ways that family and nation are interlinked in US political and social history. Although orphans are a common element in much US literature and popular culture across genres and centuries, we argue that they become especially prevalent in fiction during the 1980s - 2010s, a period of perceived national crisis. In contemporary novels by Native American, African American, and white Euro-American authors, orphans sometimes represent a wish for inclusion in family and nation, at other times a rejection of (especially patriarchal) family and nation. The complex meanings of the orphan child are further compounded by the various functions of this figure in the novels, as emotional resource for adults, as threat to a certain social order, as critique of practices of child removal and of racism, or as symbol of national trauma and recovery, functions that point to the flexibility of this literary figure. Fictional orphans, we hold, “build kinship” in alternative ways that open up possibilities for rethinking familial as well as national belonging. In the process of problematizing the limits of family and nation, and how such limits can be transgressed or maintained, the contemporary novels in our selection revise gendered genre traditions, thereby contributing to an ongoing discussion about meanings of “American literature” as well as of “America” as such.