Displacement and Emplacement in Narratives of Relocation by Romanian Women Authors

Abstract

The present paper analyses recent Romanian accounts of women's uprooting from a communist regime, foregrounding manners in which the migrants' transnational itineraries are punctuated by instances of groundedness that temporary anchor the protagonists in their translocal settings. More specifically, the article discusses the segmented itineraries of women migrants from Romania via different European countries to their final destination, the United States. I have chosen the syntagm "accounts of uprooting" instead of "migration literature", as the primary corpus of this analysis is made up of different literary genres: a novel, Train to Trieste by Domnica Radulescu and a memoir, The Gypsy Saw Two Lives, by Rodica Mihalis. The analysis of these creations introduces a comparative perspective on the shaping of translocal perceptions in the context of transnational migration. Consequently, the body of the paper investigates the migrant characters' relation to the European spaces where they settle before preparing their relocation to the USA. By adopting this approach, the discussion blends the axes of embeddedness and disembeddedness in order to provide a more comprehensive account of the intersections between gender and migration placed in a transnational context. Therefore, the discussion considers both the transgressive, fluid connotations of transnational processes and the individuals' need for stable structures despite their discontinuous itineraries.