Post-modern transferrence/reading identity politics beyond modernity: Cases from contemporary world literature.

Abstract

This dissertation aims to conceive an identity politics beyond modernity. In view of the fact that conventional modern identity politics, which focuses on retrieving the essence of an identity category, usually ends up being complicit with the modern logic of discrimination and exclusion, of interest is how to theorize a model of identity politics that more effectively tackles the asymmetrical power structure of modernity. I propose first to change our focus from the essence or authenticity of a specific identity group to the shifting boundaries and writerly contents of each category. Moreover, instead of trying to solve the problems of modern unequal power once and for all, I argue that post-modern identity politics is fundamentally a tactic of intervention and negotiation which does not aim at transcending or totalizing but at negotiating, analyzing, and modifying the power relations between different identity groups. The four cases under my examination, Morrison's Sula, Kogawa's Obasan, Hagedorn's Dogeaters, and the post-Mao Chinese roots literature, revise modern identity divisions from the positions of a racial minority, an immigrant community, a migrant subject, and a Third World country. A homoerotic representation in Sula subjects the black-white power relations to re-imagination. In Obasan, a Japanese(-)Canadian immigrant identity is conceived by an opening up of the in-between space of the Japan-Canada racial/national bipolarity. Dogeaters theorizes a Filipino(-)American migrant subjecthood, and roots literature hybridizes and thus decomposes the singularity and homogeneity of Chineseness. Given that the identity politics undertaken in each text comes hand in hand with an attempt to symbolize a piece of memory or historical past which is either repressed, displaced, or unrepresentable, the psychoanalytic concept of transference is deployed to understand how past and memory can be appropriated to be a source of one's identity. My thesis that post-modern identity is an effect of transference draws attention to the imaginary materiality of an identity without appealing to its pre-given, hence a-historical essence.