Racial ninjas and origami tigers: Cultural compartmentalization, gender mediation, Asian illegibility and the orientalization of the contemporary Asian American novel.

摘要

This interdisciplinary dissertation (which includes both a creative and critical component) focuses first on the contemporary forms of Asian American cultural production, exploring the ways in which Asian American literature actively reflects, challenges and also participates in its own self-commodification and compartmentalization of competing cultural discourses and narrative strategies in the internment novels of Yoshiko Uchida, Joy Kagawa, Julie Otsuka, and the short stories of Hisaye Yamamoto. This project argues that negative cultural compartmentalization, as exemplified in post-WWII literature, is largely a product of psychic and cultural trauma--a literary manifestation of the way stigma, class or gender discrimination, institutional racism and often war, necessitate broader, culturally flexible reconceptualizations of Asian American identity such as double-consciousness. Positive cultural compartmentalization, on the other hand, involves a more culturally flexible reconceptualization of Asian American identity such as ontological multiplicity, polyvocality and mosaic constructions of Asian American identity analyzed in the contemporary novels by Miguel Syjuco, John Pham and Natsuo Kirino. In the second part, this project critiques the mediation and construction of Asian American masculinity in the work of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and Lan Samantha Chang before analyzing the orientalization of the Asian American female narrative, arguing ultimately for greater cultural, political, creative and commercial space in which contemporary Asian American novels become a crucial part of an expanded Asian American literary and cultural archive that straddles literary aesthetics and genres, political and critical sensibilities, and formal and structural differences in a way that the current archive does not. Lastly, this interdisciplinary project attempts to carve out creative and critical space somewhere between Viet Nguyen's theory of panethnic entrepreneurialism that acknowledges the flexible cultural strategies of Asian American cultural production on one hand and Lisa Lowe's materialist binarism between oppositional narratives, fragmented modalities of cultural remembering and commercialized Asian American cultural productions on the other. It is within this liminal, culturally narrow space that the third and final component--a completed novel--dovetails with the critical components of this dissertation to form an interconnected work of scholarship and creative writing.