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Postcolonial Displacement and Transgenerational Identity Crises in Ling Ma’s Severance
Abstract
Ling Ma’s debut novel Severance, which garnered the Kirkus Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, chronicles through its first-person narrative the multigenerational displacement experiences of Chinese immigrants in contemporary America. Anchored in the protagonist Candace’s autodiegetic narration, the text meticulously interrogates the tripartite manifestations of displacement—geographical rootlessness, cultural liminality, and psychological fragmentation—that permeate the immigrant experience. This study undertakes a prismatic examination of displacement in Severance, dissecting how Candace’s familial trajectory manifests across the three constitutive dimensions. Situating their narratives within specific historical conjunctures and transnational social matrices, this analysis elucidates not merely the multifaceted causes of their displacement but also its reverberations. Ultimately, the textual exploration reveals how these individual displacements coalesce into a palimpsest of collective struggles against the homogenizing forces of global capitalism, thereby exposing the Janus-faced nature of 21st-century globalization.
Article information
Journal
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation
Volume (Issue)
8 (7)
Pages
128-136
Published
Copyright
Copyright (c) 2025 Mingyan Liang
Open access

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.