173 research outputs found
Novel Dialogue 2.7 The Novel of Revolutionary Ideas: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colleen Lye (AV)
No full textViet Thanh Nguyen, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sympathizer and its sequel The Committed, joins esteemed scholar Colleen Lye of UC-Berkeley for a candid discussion about the Asian-American novel and the role of literature and theory in radical social movements. Colleen is drawn to the mix of philosophy and suspense in Viet's work and wonders if he considers himself a member of the theory generation; that is, writers for whom literary theory is not just a way of reading texts but an impetus to create new literary forms for grappling with ideas. Viet, schooled in deconstruction and postcolonial theory, accepts the designation with a caveat: If he is a novelist of ideas, then he is a novelist of revolutionary ideas. Inspired by Fanon's anticolonialism and Gayatri Spivak's concept of the double bind, Viet's defiantly politicizing aesthetic looks to place the colonial subject, particularly the Vietnamese refugee, at the center of multiple stories of American and French imperialism. Colleen and Viet reflect on the role of academic training in Viet's transformation from Asian-Americanist scholar into Asian-American novelist and discuss the peculiarities of immigrant Asian identity in terms of language. Mother tongues, bilingualism, orphaned language, and adopted language all become metaphors for how Asian-American writers must balance the loss of heritage and weight of expectation with the call to self-invention. Plus, Viet reveals the not-so-wholesome treats that enabled him to complete The Sympathizer
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The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Early Asian American Literature
No full textAbstractThe Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Early Asian American LiteraturebyAudrey Wu ClarkDoctor of Philosophy in EnglishUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Colleen Lye, Co-ChairProfessor Richard Cándida Smith, Co-ChairMy project traces a genealogy of universalism in early Asian American literature that led to the panethnic formation of the Asian American literary canon in the 1960s and 1970s. I contribute to the recent criticisms of panethnicity as the organizing principle of the field by arguing that the panethnic paradigm, based solely on the anachronistically imposed alliance of excluded diverse Asian ethnic groups, did not structure early Asian American literature. Instead, I argue that the authors of these early texts represented the racial particularity of their "Asian American" protagonists as universal. The protagonists' performances of universalism exposed the doubleness of American universalism--that is, the failed universalism that excluded racial minorities and the promised inclusive universalism that is yet to come. My conceptualization of Asian American universalism fortifies the theoretical aspect of the sociological paradigm of panethnicity by offering a different and more historically specific approach than the deconstructive readings of political resistance and melancholic abjection that have very recently theorized panethnicity. Since Americanism was conceived through liberal universalism during the period of Asian exclusion (1882-1943), becoming "Asian American" for these authors and their protagonists impossibly and yet productively universalized their racial particularity to their predominantly white audiences. For some critics, Asian American subjectivity is imagined through only the impossibility of Asian American universalism. By contrast, I argue that the Asian American is formed through the dialectic between racial particularity as an "alien ineligible to citizenship" and liberal universalism. The aim of the dialectic in each of the works I study is framed by the historical moment of each work's publication: In my first two chapters on Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Sadakichi Hartmann's and Yone Noguchi's modernist haikus, I demonstrate that their protagonists and poetic personas attempt to claim space within the American literary imagination during the Progressive Era. In the latter two chapters, I examine the ways in which the protagonists of Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Caste and Outcast and Younghill Kang's East Goes West, and Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart employ modernist forms of temporal nonlinearity to transcend the capitalist commodification of linear time during the Popular Front era. Through performances of American racial, gender, and class norms, all of the Asian American protagonists of my study not only reveal the exclusions and limitations of American universalism but also attempt to redeem it by articulating new sets of demands for racial, gender, and class equality. The empirical non-existence of Asian American universalism poses a baseline problem of invisibility and thus the demands of racial egalitarianism mobilized by the "not-yet" of Asian American universalism take the visible or more easily identifiable forms of modernist avant-gardism and progressive gender politics in all four of my chapters
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American Techno-Orientalism: Speculative Fiction and the Rise of China
No full textAmerican Techno-Orientalism asks how Orientalism and literary form have responded to China’s post-socialist, post-1989 rise. It explores this question through readings of speculative fiction, in which Orientalism has been an aesthetic dominant since the 1980s, and demonstrates how technologically-inflected, future-oriented genres have transformed Asian racial forms as they have been mediated by Anglophone and Asian/American fiction. It argues that techno-Orientalist forms enable the depiction and racialization of new groups of economically privileged yet aesthetically underrepresented subjects like transnational workers holding H1-B visas, queer techno-cosmopolitans, and Asian/American math and science nerds. While these subjects are well known through caricature and stereotype, the texts examined in this dissertation reveal how such caricatures and stereotypes have adjusted to account for subjectivities newly privileged by deepening U.S.-China interdependency.This dissertation also argues that a historically informed description of techno-Orientalist aesthetics will reveal how China’s rise has rebalanced the East versus West framework that has hitherto grounded critiques of Orientalism. This development is due in part to how perceptions of U.S.-China interdependency, which conform and conflict with the more familiar logics of Saidian Orientalism, bring into focus historically and formally specific modes of Orientalism, which is typically treated as antinomic and transhistorical. Consequently, the techno-Orientalist forms in Japan-inflected novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer differ sharply from China-inflected novels like Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. These forms move away from an aesthetic of reification indexed to U.S.-Japan rivalry of the 1970s and 1980s, to an aesthetic of totality indexed to U.S.-China interdependency and attuned to social relations. As a consequence, fiction by Asian American writers like Ted Chiang and Charles Yu has developed along so-called “postracial” lines, as Asian and Asian American characters are complicated when mapped geopolitically rather than domestically
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Brownness: Mixed Identifications in Minority Immigrant Literature, 1900-1960
No full textMy dissertation challenges our preconceptions of the ethnic literary tradition in the United States. Minority literature is generally read within a framework of resistance that prioritizes anti-hegemonic and anti-racist writings. I focus on a set of recalcitrant texts, written in the first part of the twentieth century, that do not fit neatly within this framework. My chapters trace an arc from Ameen Rihani's The Book of Khalid (1911), which personifies a universal citizen who refuses to be either Arab or American, to Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), which dramatizes the appeal of white identification for upwardly mobile Barbadian immigrants. I present the first comparative analysis of Afro-Caribbean, Arab, Filipino, Latino, and South Asian immigrant writings. This archive includes familiar figures such as Claude McKay and William Carlos Williams as well as understudied writers such as Abraham Rihbany and Dalip Singh Saund. I argue that these texts feature a common character: a character who does not want to be exclusively minor, who seeks to identify as widely as possible with majoritarian formations. I propose that this archetype of mixed identification be understood as "brown." Brownness is not a racial category but a literary characterization. It represents the unwieldy paradox of the majority-identified minority subject, a paradox that criticism of ethnic literature has largely ignored. I chart the complex attachments of these brown characters, their Orientalist mediations, asymptotic Americanisms, approximations of whiteness--in sum, their disidentification with minoritization itself. By exploring these vexed desires, I help to explain the perennial attraction of brown characters not only for racialized minorities but also for narratives of U.S. exceptionalism
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Not To Repeat History: Racialization and Combinatory Textuality in Contemporary Asian American and African American Experimental Writing
No full textThis dissertation, Not To Repeat History: Racialization and Combinatory Textuality in Contemporary Asian American and African American Experimental Writing, examines the relationship between textual strategies and political imagination at work in Asian American and African American experimental writers Nathaniel Mackey, Myung Mi Kim, and Ed Roberson. Providing one of the first cross-cultural studies of contemporary Asian American and African American experimental writing, I contend that these writers pit two aspects of literary form against each other so as to stage a confrontation between the experience of racism and the possibility of escaping its logic. I argue that all of these writers turn to serial literary forms as a way of imitating what they take to be the power of racism to make individuals merely identical. At the same time these writers imagine the building blocks of textuality as sites of provisional abundance, either because of the traditionally combinatory possibilities of texts, or because those possibilities are made evident anew once texts are brought into relation with other media (for example in relation to music). I call this relation between serial literary forms and combinatory textual possibilities "racial constructivism." In other words, I argue that the poets share an understanding of racialized identities as both interchangeable and discontinuous, and so counterpose a combinatorial textuality which imagines both space and time for grief, renewal, or repair. My dissertation argues that inasmuch as these imaginings of the resources of textuality for poetry are pitted against an experience of racism as departicularizing, the poets help us to move beyond the antinomy of a postmodern "poetics of form" and a postnationalist "politics of cultural difference." My first chapter, entitled "An Axiomatic Chorus: Improvisation and Imagined Identities in Nathaniel Mackey's From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate," argues that Nathaniel Mackey's interest in musical improvisation pushes past texts in order to return to them with a renewed sense of combinatory possibilities. By utilizing the epistolary novel form, and refusing linear narrative development in favor of oblique chains of association, and taking jazz improvisation as a model for black experimental literary practice, Mackey not only produces a restless variety of figures for expressive force but also invents a digressive form spacious enough to hold them all in tension. In Mackey's epistolary novel series, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the protagonist N. writes letters to an interlocutor known only as "The Angel of Dust," whose responses are alluded to but absent from the texts. In these letters, N. chronicles the performances of an imagined group of avant-garde jazz musicians, the "Molimo m'Atet," and searches for linguistic analogues to musical improvisation. While readers are kept guessing as to whether the anonymity or pseudonymity of the "Angel of Dust" names an imagined muse, an addiction, or perhaps Mackey himself, the combination of the particulate metaphor of dust with the implicit animating power of "angel" provides a compact description of the novels' assemblage of figures out of permutable textual building blocks. I argue that the novel series both embodies and diagnoses the limits of such a constructivist impulse by revealing how such combinatory literary strategies mime racialization processes in order to overcome them. I argue that at key moments in the novel series, this racial constructivism is problematized by the protagonists' immobilizing experiences of contingency and automaticity In my second chapter, "`What is nearest is destroyed': Myung Mi Kim's `Thirty and Five Books' and Racial Comparison," I show how Myung Mi Kim's interest in the "recombinatory power of language" (Kim, Statement 251) functions both as a metaphor for cultural hybridization and as a set of formal strategies capable of representing interracial conflict and the dissolution of intercultural social bonds. In this chapter, I analyze an underexamined feature of the poet's works in a poem entitled "Thirty and Five Books" from a more recent volume, Dura--the essential political ambiguity of the poem's use of "recombinatory" or serial forms, the problem of the comparability of nonwhite communities during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and finally the significance of the systems of counting, accounting, and measurement which permeate the poem. "Thirty And Five Books" takes this interest in "accounts and recounting" and interrogates the hierarchical racial schemas which structured media representations of interracial conflict between African American and Asian American communities during the Los Angeles riots in 1992 in the wake of the acquittal of four police officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King. I contend that the systems of measurement and classification which organize so much of the poem are inseparable from the poem's vision of non-hierarchical social relations modeled after the linguistic hybridity of what the poet calls a "A banter English."My third chapter, "Infinite Regressions: Ed Roberson, Serial Identities, and the 1960s Civil Rights Movement Lunch Counter Sit-Ins," performs an extended close reading of Roberson's poem "Sit In What City We're In," from the author's 2006 book City Eclogue. Roberson's poem reimagines the waves of 1960s lunch counter sit-in's as an opportunity to pose fundamental questions about the nature of racial representation in the post-civil rights era. Roberson does this by reconfiguring the sit-ins in space and in time: spatially, by tracking how mirrors behind a lunch counter create an infinite regress of reflected images of protestors and counterprotestors alike; and temporally, by reconnecting the evanescent figure of the city to the earth and enduring cyclical geological processes. Roberson's poem "Sit In What City We're In" commemorates the lunch counter sit-in movement which swept the south in the 1960s by dilating the moment and the movement in space and time and by refusing the kind of distanced, spectatorial historical framing which would safely consign the antiracist ideals of the civil right movement to the past. Instead, Roberson reimagines the scene of the sit-ins as what I want to call a failed dialectic of racial recognition in which the promise of formal equality, desegregation, and equal protection gives way to a meditation on the homogenizing force of such ideals. I argue that Roberson stages the civil rights sit-ins as a moment of conflict between an integrationist politics in pursuit of equal citizenship rights and a later pluralist multicultural politics of recognition which emphasize cultural difference rather than similarity. As a result, the poem, and I would argue the City Eclogue as a whole, pioneers a novel mode of historical recollection which reveals both the appearance of the past in the present, and vice-versa. Finally I argue that Roberson's interest in the figure of the city, and the anonymity of urban life, allows the poem to represent the promise of formal equality as fundamentally compatible with segregated social relations
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Imminent Communities: Transpacific Literary Form and Racialization, 1847-1920
No full textThis study examines literary contestations of an imperial discourse I call Pacific Imminence, a ruse of American exceptionalism that framed U.S. Pacific ascendancy as an impending development inaugurating global economic prosperity and a harmonious community of humankind. Through the continental imaginary of Manifest Destiny, most Americanist scholarship has viewed the Pacific as a peripheral site of empire-building in the long nineteenth century. By contrast, I argue that the Pacific uniquely catalyzed a globalist re-branding of U.S. imperialism that American and East Asian writers resisted through fictional forms. Such works undercut Pacific imminence by narrativizing the persistence of colonial antagonisms. In the first two chapters, I examine the Pacific fictions of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville, tracing the roots of Pacific imminence to the antebellum era. In the third and fourth chapters, I analyze counter-narratives of fraught cosmopolitanism in the work of Filipino author José Rizal and Chinese-American author Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton).</p
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Impossible Diplomacies: Japanese American Literature from 1884 to 1938
No full textThis dissertation examines writings by and about Japanese men---students, gentlemen, vagrants, and servants---who lived and worked in the United States prior to 1938. The goal of this dissertation is to outline what "Japanese American literature" might look like if its basis was not a subject position but a series of diplomatic relations.The central argument of this dissertation is that during a time when the "Japanese American" was an "impossible subject" from the vantage of the laws of the United States, Japanese men who lived and worked in the United States staged---through literature---an "impossible diplomacy." The writers I consider in this dissertation---Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944), Arishima Takeo (1878-1923), Nagahara Shoson (1901--??), and Kato Saburo (??--??)---were not official cultural brokers, but subjects estranged both from their country of origin (Japan), and the nation where they lived and worked (the United States). As aliens ineligible to citizenship in the United States as a "republic" of letters, these writers turned to literature as a means to mediate their estrangement from both Japan and the United States.The four chapters trace a historical arc through key shifts in the diplomatic and legal paradigms which governed the status of Japanese residents in the Untied States: the Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1858), the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907-1908, the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, and the Neutrality Act of 1935. In Chapter One, I read Sadakichi Hartmann's Conversations with Walt Whitman (1895) in concert with Whitman's Calamus sequence, tracing how the logic of ``engrafting" in the texts parallels structures of equality and inequality in the Treaty of Amity and Commerce. In Chapter Two, I read Arishima Takeo's Labyrinth(1918) arguing that the novel describes an economy of tears shared by men which reveals underlying contradictions of the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907-1908. In Chapter Three, I recover Lament in the Night (1925), a novel written by Nagahara Shoson (1901--), a young immigrant who entered the United States ten years after the institution of the Gentlemen's Agreement. I construct an ``epistemology of the pocket" to address the intimacies and exposures of the Japanese American urban vagrant. In Chapter Four, I read a short story by Kato Saburo (??-??) titled, ``Mr. Yama and the China Incident" (1938). I argue that the story stages a form of ``vernacular diplomacy" which counters, through script and gesture, the discourse of ``national people's diplomacy" formed during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In turn, Kato's introduction of a third party---a speaking Chinese subject---opens the field of impossible diplomacy from the bilateral scheme of the Japanese American to the multilateral question of Asian American literature
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Voicing Asia: Post-Cold War Novels, Geopolitics, and Human Rights
No full textThis dissertation explores how novels and geopolitics differently represent a voice as "Asian." By incorporating cases studies of how U.S. policy "voiced" culturally representative anti-communist voices, it highlights the historical and formal specificity of post-Cold War Asian novelisticauthor's racial identity and ideological disposition as the primary determinants of the narrator's reliability. Voicing Asia considers the narrative technique of unreliability with respect to human rights flashpoints within U.S.-Asian geopolitics. Paired with the "voices" of puppet presidents, POWs, and cultural diplomats, the post-Cold War narrative voices in my study offer a critical response to the geopolitical production of Asia's Cold War allegiances and a formal manifestation of the contradictions within a post-Cold War order. Specifically, these voices are all unreliable in ways that elicit a historically specific form of Oriental inscrutability. In the novels of Chang-rae Lee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, Wei Hui, and Mian Mian, unreliability keys to ethnic betrayal, excessive patriotism, calculated disinterestedness, and uninhibited consumerism. These forms of unreliability bear out an especially insidious and morally inhumane form of capitalist modernization that is specific to post-Cold War Asian states. I argue that the formal features of first-person "Asian" narration index but also disrupt this racial economy of Human Rights Discourse. In the novels of Lee and Ishiguro, narrative unreliability doubles as a racial trope and a literary technique, eliciting both an extraordinarily inscrutable "Asian" and a normatively fallible "human." In the other novels I explore, unreliability is much less at the narrative surface. For Jin, Mian Mian, and Wei Hui, unreliability results from the recruitment of Chinese literature for the contradictory ends of globalization (which finds its most insidious manifestation in Pacific Rim economies) and human rights (which takes Asian development as paradigmatic of modernity's inhuman conditions). I contend that novelistic evocations of "Asian voice" register, without being irreducible to, Asia's geopolitical status. Most strikingly, these novelistic voices, precisely at their most unreliable moments, can produce the narrative effect of an "Asian human." I show that locating and hearing an "Asian human" voice requires first, a more nuanced account of the formal relation between Asian narrators and Asian authors and second, a less thematically oriented approach to locating in post-Cold War literature transnationalism, globalism, cosmopolitianism, and other variations of what Eric Hayot calls "world-oriented discourse." This "Asian human" challenges the geopolitical contradiction between the homo economicus of Pacific Rim Discourse and the Western liberal subject of Human Rights Discourse. As a distinctly literary voice, it also undoes the perceived correspondence between the subject of the literary humanities and that of human rights. The historical specificity of a post-Cold War historical juncture, in which Asian capitalist modernity represents the limit of humanity, helps us register the exceptionality of an inscrutable yet fallible, Asian and human voice that can be heard only within the domain of literature
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Salto Mortale: Narrative, Speculation, and the Chance of the Future
No full text"Salto Mortale: Narrative, Speculation, and the Chance of the Future," reads contemporary American fiction and economic form. The present market crisis has revealed that the last three decades of American economic life have been dominated by finance capital. But we have not yet realized how profoundly finance has changed our sense of history itself. I argue that "speculative" capitalism has transformed how we relate to the past and how we imagine the future.In a metaphor borrowed from Kant's account of speculative philosophy, Marx describes financial speculation as a "fatal leap" into the unknown. Marx's appropriation suggests that speculation engineers a future both uncertain and imminent, both risky and foreseeable. In our own moment of volatile finance, the future is commodified by derivatives, quantified by risk models, and preempted in military strategy. Brief, knowable, and instrumentalized, the financialized future is no longer connected to the past and no longer promises utopian possibility.As a mode of linking the present with the to-come, speculation is also an imaginative act. My dissertation considers how speculation has defined contemporary narratives and how those narratives challenge finance capital's historical ideology. In Chapter 1, I look at contemporary apocalyptic fiction and film and argue that these narratives derive their temporality and their politics from financial derivatives. Chapter 2 locates a more critical response to late postmodernity in the popular genre of counterfactual history. Iraq War counterfactuals (Paul Auster's Man in the Dark and Richard Kelly's film Southland Tales) index the traumas of the first fully privatized war, while post-9/11 counterfactuals by Michael Chabon and Philip Roth register neoliberalism's negation of liberal democracy. In Chapter 3, I read 9/11 fiction alongside the doctrine of preemption, arguing that both post-9/11 literature and post-9/11 politics struggle to comprehend an event both familiar and unpredictable. I conclude by considering cultural representation in a moment of economic crisis. I examine the ways that horror film associates the financialization of risk with the temporality of suspense; connecting these films to terrorism novels and films, I discover a mode of speculative allegory that illuminates the relationship between finance, violence, and literary form
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History Discontinued: Futures and Forms of Translingual Korean Diasporic Literature
No full textThis dissertation offers a prehistory of contemporary Asian American anti-imperialist politics by reading Korean diasporic literature from the 1930s and the 1960s. Examining these early decades of Korean diasporic literature prior to its institutional rise in the 1990s reveals the changing horizons of its anti-imperialist imagination across the last century. Post-’80s Korean diasporic literature has served as ground zero for the “melancholic turn” of Asian American studies, producing critical efforts to remember traumatic colonial histories and losses that shadow Asian American lives. The significance of earlier diasporic writing in understanding today’s melancholic anti-imperialism, however, has remained obscured. The writers I consider—Chu Yosŏp (1902–1972), Nak Chung Thun (1876–1953), and Richard Kim (1932–2009)—use their literary works to explore how Korea and the Korean diaspora might be liberated from imperial violence. Their novelistic endeavors not only push against national boundaries but also adopt politically radical visions of the future, informed by the international leftist movements of their times. While the ’30s and ’60s are both decades in which the possibility of a leftist future was disappearing from the Korean imaginary—whether due to Japanese colonial rule or the rise of South Korea’s anti-communist authoritarian regime—Chu, Thun, and Kim participate in the making of a global left literary atlas. I show how these writers navigated the contradictions and injustices of their historical experiences while also experimenting in genres as varied as naturalism, romance, and alternate history.
I first recover a vibrant Korean diasporic literary scene of the ’30s, approaching translation as an opportunity to excavate voices that crossed the borders of national leftist literary cultures. I then show how the diasporic ’60s suffers from the unavailability of leftist politics in authoritarian South Korea, while still remembering and longing for past radicalisms. I argue that this melancholia bridges the ’60s and the post-’80s, in that while the earlier writers’ visions of the future may seem lost today, their recovery reintroduces the importance of anti-capitalist critique in advancing anti-imperialist work. The literary history I present opens a window onto leftist internationalist visions and the radical futures that once existed in diasporic imaginations
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