“May the Circle Be Unbroken”: Looking at the Relations between Self, Other and the World from a Critical Cosmopolitan Outlook in Julia Alvarez’s Finding Miracles

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the critical cosmopolitan discourse that permeates Julia Alvarez’s Finding Miracles so as to better understand the relations between self, other, and the world that are spotlighted in the text. In this young adult novel, Alvarez follows the self-discovery journey of Milly, a Latin American adoptee raised in Vermont, focusing on her evolution from an uncommitted girl to a critical reflective and socially responsible individual. This transformation begins when Pablo, a refugee from her birth country, settles in Vermont, which instills in the protagonist fears about her place in the world. To illustrate this evolution, this paper starts by examining the relation between strangers, embodiment, and place depicted in the first part of the novel. Thus, attention is paid to the anxieties triggered by Pablo’s status as stranger in the US. Drawing on critical cosmopolitan scholarship, this paper moves on to explore how Milly’s dialogical encounters with Pablo open a space of love and decoloniality that defies colonial structures, engendering in turn new ways of thinking about herself, others, and the world. Finally, this article argues that young adult novels like this enable the development of a young readership that can critically reflect upon social, cultural, and political issues.