Beyond Western Individuation: Mother-Daughter Dyads in Diasporic Contemporary Literature ‡ Alyssa Belknap Project Mentor(s): Candace Walsh, PhD This project examines the ways contemporary diasporic coming-of-age narratives evolve the bildungsroman genre beyond the Western emphasis of individuation by shifting tropes of the absent mother and mother-daughter splits to narratives that reconfigure the mother-daughter dyad as a “cord” to homeland and culture. It interrogates how mother-daughter dyads function in the female bildungsroman and whether the need for individuation from the mother in the quest toward self-actualization is a Western concept that is being resisted in contemporary texts by women writers of the Palestinian, African, and Brazilian diasporas. This work is interdisciplinary in nature and seeks to examine the cultured and gendered impacts of these bonds while analyzing this dyad’s mark on the female bildungsroman genre. This essay asks, “Why do Western coming-of-age narratives lean on individuation?” and “How can communal-minded mother-daughter narratives shift perceptions of mothers in media and society?” This work is inspired by project mentor, Dr. Candace Walsh’s work on contemporary female bildungsroman power structures and reconciliation in mother-daughter dyads as found in contemporary literature. This project is funded by the foundry10 Experimental Research and Immersive Studies grant and informed by research conducted through attending panels hosted by writers of the diaspora at the 2026 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, library-based literary research in literary studies, feminist theory, and immigration studies, as well as contemporary literary novels centering diasporic mother-daughter narratives, including, Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, Susan Abulhawa’s Against The Loveless World, and Bruna Dantas Lobato’s Blue Light Hours . Presentation Type: Oral Presentation (May 20, 9:30am–5:00pm) Keywords: Mother-Daughter Narratives, Diaspora, Bildungsroman, Contemporary Literature, Individuation SOURCE Form ID: 231
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