Memory Mechanisms in Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Darraj’s The Inheritance of Exile

Abstract

This article discusses the mechanisms of memory and the schemes of transcending past recollections in Chinese American novelist Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Arab American novelist Susan Darraj’s Inheritance of Exile (2007). Both texts highlight the dialectical representations of remembrance in diasporic narratives. Consequently, the article underscores the intersectionality of memory, healing, and ethnic identity in both novels. Tan’s and Darraj’s novels foreground memory narratives in which self-recovery and wholeness of identity are closely examined. The paper is a comparative study that examines the dialectics and divergent forces of memory representations in Tan’s and Darraj’s novels through scrutinizing the power of remembering in strengthening and/or justifying the characters’ enchantment of the present or their glorifying of the past.