SEPARATION ANXIETIES - Lsu - Louisiana State University

potentially both timely and important. I hope that it can serve as a starting point for studies of
separatist representations in American fiction.
As for structure, each chapter herein will examine texts that focus on a different kind of
separatist community. Chapter one will focus on lesbian feminist community; chapter two will
examine two versions of religious separatism; chapter three will examine constructions of what I
term experiential separatism; and chapter four will examine a work in which black communities
are the primary focus. This project attempts to cover a large cross-section of identity “axes” and
different artistic representations of dominant American culture. This examination will hopefully
illuminate further the increasing multiculturalism of millennial America, its artists’ concern with
conceptions of difference and belonging, and some of the ways in which differences intersect.
Here I should admit the possibility that none of these artists have consciously constructed
representations of separatism and separatist philosophies per se; however, each narrative depends
on the conflicts between representatives of mainstream American society and a group that
removes itself from that society, geographically and/or philosophically, for political and personal
reasons. In constructing and exploring these characters, the groups they form, the spaces they
create, and the philosophies by which they try to live, each of these artists represents separatism
as an attempt to question dominant American society and myths by creating new social
structures; one major challenge of such attempts is eschewing old prejudices in the new
community. In order to examine the texts’ different ideas for how these social questions and
revisions might work, I use the following questions as starting points. 1) In what specific ways
do these artists revise or adhere to the general definition of dominant culture that I begin with
above? 2) What problems does each text construct as implicit in the characters’ attempts to alter
the dominant paradigm? 10 3) How is the individual represented in relation to the separatist
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