Intersecting Margins: Literary Narratives of Multidimensional Identity and Marginalisation

Abstract

This chapter explores how contemporary literature represents intersectional identities with the use of innovative narrative strategies. It argues that narrative form itself can create intersectionality and thus make complex, layered experiences accessible to the reader by moving beyond traditional analyses that view marginalised identities as separate categories. The study focuses on Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987/ 2004), Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands /La Frontera (1987/ 2012), and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003) as they offer distinct yet convergent literary articulations of multidimensional identity, enabling a comparative exploration of how race, gender, language, memory, and migration intersect to produce varied but structurally connected experiences of marginalisation. It examines how narrative techniques like fragmented and dual perspective narration, non-linear temporality and linguistic hybridity reflect the multi-dimensionality of marginalisation. Beloved’s fragmented voices and temporal disjunctions show how race, gender and historical trauma interact; the use of dual perspective narration and diasporic temporality in The Namesake presents generations of cultural dislocation; and the use of linguistic hybridity and genre-blending in Borderlands presents Chicana queer border identities. With the use of theoretical frameworks of intersectionality, trauma theory, diaspora studies, and postcolonial criticism, the study demonstrate how narrative form can function as a site for expressing intersectionality; thus creating an interdisciplinary framework that combines literary analysis with critical theories about identity and social marginalisation. In conclusion, the study contends that literature does more than simply portray marginalisation; it acts as a performance of the very complexity of those who live at the intersection of many overlapping social forces (Crenshaw, 1989).

DOI - https://doi.org/10.66496/LCAP.9788168710108.2026.72-93