Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Bona, Mary Jo | Santa Ana, Jeffrey | Diedrich, Lisa | Balce-Cortes, Maria-Nerissa.
Date
2014-12-01
Keywords
American literature | Asian American literature, ghosts, haunting, melancholia
Department
Department of English.
Language
en_US
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/77553
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
The dissertation studies the prevalence of ghosts and haunting in contemporary Asian American fiction as a telling symptom of racial and transnational melancholia. Analyzing seminal novels from the past two decades by American writers of Asian descent, I argue that melancholia functions in these texts as a critical form of resistance to the untenable demands of national identity formation and cultural belonging. From Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts to Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging to Andrew X Pham's Catfish and Mandala, depictions of ghosts and haunting are prevalent across a striking range of recent Asian American texts, and the dissertation investigates why this trope is so potent a device for understanding Asian American subjectivities. Asian American racialization, I maintain, is a process deeply haunted not only by U.S. military intervention and imperialism in Asia but also by official historical narratives that foreclose or willfully forget minority histories in order to uphold a fictive national harmony. Through readings of Monique Truong's The Book of Salt (2003), Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life (1999), Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother (1997), and Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl (2002), this study advances recent scholarship on racial melancholia and loss by repositioning the melancholic psyche from a state of debilitating pathology to a richly productive site of resistance and critique. Taken together, these texts reveal a crucial anxiety at the heart of Asian America--an anxiety over an American amnesia that threatens to erase fraught histories of violence, war, colonization, and exclusion. Contemporary Asian American literature challenges such deliberate forgetting through the figure of the ghost. From the reverberating lessons of the Vietnam War, to the refiguring of Japanese internment in “ indefinite detention,” to the presumed triumph of the “ Forgotten War” in Korea— a war that still has not ended— the clinging to loss that is characteristic of melancholia cannot simply be read in these texts as a debilitating helplessness born of racism and trauma, but must be viewed as a demand for political accountability and historical memory. | 159 pages
Recommended Citation
Edwards, Naomi, "Haunting History: Melancholia and Specters of Racialization in Contemporary Asian American Fiction" (2014). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3353.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3353