My study examines three female Black British bildungsromane: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Joan Riley’s Waiting in the Twilight, and Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen. By combining a study of a relatively established novel form with contemporary female diasporic fictions, my work looks at how gender, race and location complicate the tropes of the genre, while still adhering to many of its parameters. I explore ways in which the existential states of loneliness, isolation, and solitude faced by the female protagonists in England assist or inhibit the formation of collectivity and subjectivity. This study pays particular attention to ways that community formation and friendship, as well as work and affective labor, serve as means to find/create a sense of home in diasporic conditions, as in Brick Lane and Second-Class Citizen. I also study how a sense of community falters because of a disconnection from productive work in Waiting in the Twilight. / Department of English

Through a comparative literary study of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Olga Grjasnova’s Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt, this thesis concludes that although the migrant experience is heterogeneous and that integration is a difficult process that varies through the diversity of experiences, these experiences can be unified by the common way in which migrants learn to “belong” by connecting with voices of the past and present and by building and maintaining relationships that extend beyond the limits of place. In defending this argument, the thesis draws upon themes of Bakhtinian heteroglossia, nationalism and transnationalism, space, globalism, and migration. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015 / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection