Transcultural Imaginings: Bulgarians writing America
Alexandra Glavanakova
The paper focuses on the interrelation between migration and the imagination. It aims to explore issues of cultural identity, related especially to processes of marginalization, cultural insularity, social disparity, transcultural confrontations, the complex experience of acculturation, its success or failure through compromise, negotiation and assimilation. The object of study are two novels by Bulgarian writers achary Karabashliev 18 % Gray (2008, published in English 2013) and Alek Popov The Black Box (2007, published in English 2015) – who use the U.S. as asetting, a trope, and an allegory to reflect on the contemporary process of transcultural migration, dislocation, and expatriation in a post-communist, post 9/11-world. The questions the paper examines are: How is identity constructed in the fluid communities of transnational space that is neither home nor alien space? What is the process of transmission of one national tradition to another/ others, and ultimately how is new transnational identity demarcated? How are the psychic battles between the old world replete with myth and traditions, and the new world proliferate with material opportu= nity revealed in the material examined? The theoretical framework used is that of transculturality defined as works which are no longer identifiable with only one national culture or one national landscape (Arianna Dagnino 2015 8).
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Key words: transcultural identity, Bulgarian, migrant writings
Name: Alexandra Glavanakova
Academic title: PhD
Country: Bulgaria
University: Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”