Multi Consciousness: Simultaneity, Splintering, and Structures of Feeling in Contemporary American Fictions of Displacement

Multi consciousness is a cross-cultural and cross-temporal affective structure which poses questions regarding how different modes of displacement (enforced relocation, immigration), erasure (social and political), and violence affect formations of consciousness, and how representations of subjecthood or lack thereof alter perceptions of self. I unpack the metaphor of the multiplied, fragmented and split as it is repurposed in contemporary American fictional works of displacement to understand how multiplicity resonates more destructively with displaced and marginalized individuals. Multi consciousness accounts for and contains double, triple, and mestiza consciousness, and furthermore articulates the complexities of marginalized subjecthood in the contemporary moment—in the moment of ever-present technology where everything is instantaneous and multiplied, in the moment continued and ongoing racial and identity politics.

I will discuss multi consciousness as a shared structure of feeling, as a practice of assimilation and mourning, and the various metaphors of multi consciousness that contemporary American fictional works of displacement engage in. The dissertation works through Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (2020), Eric Nguyen’s Things We Lost to the Water (2021), Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (2020), Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015), James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Tommy Orange’s There There (2018), Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998), Arrival (2016), and Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2021). I look to these works to outline the condition of multi consciousness: mourning, the sense of being haunted, displacement and diaspora, multiple competing ways of inhabiting the body/being in the world, the sense of inhabiting multiple timelines/worlds, the presence of whiteness as consciousness, seeking/creating a double of the self, and disassociation. Through this varied bibliography, I argue that multi consciousness surfaces as an evident cross-cultural, cross-generational, shared structure of feeling within contemporary American fictions of displacement.