Topic
Imagining Belonging: Migrant Spatial Narratives of New York in Maria Elena Sandovici’s Dogs with Bagels
This paper examines the representation of immigrant spatial experience in Dogs with Bagels by Maria Elena Sandovici, focusing on the ways urban space shapes narratives of belonging, identity, and cultural transition in New York City. Situated within the broader project Real and Imagined Spaces of New York, the study explores how migrants perceive, inhabit, and reinterpret urban environments while negotiating their position between cultures, languages, and social structures.
The paper approaches the city as both a material and imagined landscape, drawing on spatial theory, literary urban studies, and migration studies to examine how public and intimate spaces participate in the construction of migrant identity. In Sandovici’s novel, New York appears as a multilayered symbolic terrain shaped by the mythology of the American Dream and by the lived realities of immigrant life. Through the experiences of the Romanian Pop family – particularly the mother Maria and daughter Liliana – the narrative illustrates the tensions between aspiration and exclusion, belonging and alienation, that characterize the migrant encounter with the metropolis.
The analysis focuses on several emblematic urban sites that structure the novel’s spatial imagination: domestic interiors, gastro-places, boroughs of Manhattan and Queens, and iconic locations such as the Plaza Hotel. These places function as narrative nodes through which the characters negotiate their sense of belonging. While glamorous Manhattan embodies the seductive yet often illusory promise of success, more marginal spaces such as immigrant neighbourhoods and shared apartments reveal the processes of adaptation and self-redefinition that shape migrant lives. The search for “home” thus becomes both a physical and metaphysical journey.
By examining the interplay between urban mythologies and intimate spatial experiences, the paper argues that Dogs with Bagels portrays New York not merely as a backdrop but as an active agent in the formation of migrant subjectivity. Ultimately, the novel reframes the city from a site of unattainable dreams into a space of negotiated belonging, where identity emerges through the continual reimagining of place.
Oksana Starshova (Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University)
Oksana Starshova is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Philology and Translation at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. She is currently affiliated with Pembroke College and the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge. In her PhD thesis, she explored the problem of the author in the novels of American postmodernism, focusing on the works of John Barth. In her current research, she develops the theoretical framework of spatial migration studies to analyse twenty-first-century migration novels set in New York. Her research interests include American postmodernism, migration studies, spatial theory, border studies, urban literature, geocriticism, New York narratives