Lost in Chinatown: Representations of white alienation in American fiction and film.

摘要

My dissertation, "Lost in Chinatown: Representations of White Alienation in American Fiction and Film," questions why white and Asian American identity formations have depended on Chinatown to constitute their presence in America, particularly in creating a discourse of racial alienation that has re-surfaced recently in the conservative backlash against minority claims of racial injustice. I begin by connecting the depiction of white alienation in Chinatown in A Hazard of New Fortunes, William Dean Howells's novel about labor unrest in New York City, to the late nineteenth-century xenophobic concern with Chinese immigration. The following seven chapters provide close readings of postmodern literary and cinematic texts that re-present the scene of white alienation in Chinatown in order to question underlying power relations and to explore alternative notions of racialized subject formation. Drawing from the general fields of post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, my analysis focuses on competing fictions that contribute to the creation of Chinatown as a trope, a metonymic figure, the "sign" that opens new possible meanings of what Chinatown signifies in our minds and how it situates our reading of racial identity. Chinatown, in my view, is not limited to geographic location, or to historical categorization according to a linear timeline, or to sociological case study of an ethnic enclave. While it may be dependent upon and formative of these fields of knowledge, conceiving Chinatown as an invention of the racial discourse of white alienation can open Chinatown not only to analyses of the multiple meanings Chinatown can hold but also of the constructed nature of white and Asian American identities. While my hypothesis is that the Chinatown of the imagination helps expose the race, gender, and class contradictions inherent in the process of trying to create any normative identity in America, my goal is to try to show the limits of both defending and denouncing white identity formation in America as well as question the possibilities for an Asian American politics of difference as a position from which to critique white identity effectively.