Alien states: Colonial fetishisms and Asian-American migrations.

Abstract

My dissertation re-maps the relationship between geography, national identity, and racialized/gendered encounters of colonials, natives, and Asian Americans. Drawing on Freudian, Marxist and post-colonial theories of the fetish, I re-examine existing approaches to colonial and Asian American texts, highlighting the intersections between imagined states of identity and the economic, social, and cultural reality colonials and immigrants face upon arrival to a new landscape. Applying models of the fetish and post-colonial theories of subjectivity to imperialist and Asian American narratives, my project links theories of race to imagined geographical spaces. This approach redefines the traditional terms of nationalism and subjectivity and explores the connection between British and Asian American migration narratives. Alien States begins by contextualizing established and contemporary theories of the fetish in relationship to literature of migration and focuses on how desire mediates the reception and interpretation of geography with respect to identity. The first half of my dissertation focuses on British colonial encounters with native populations in turn of the century imperialist migration narratives by John Buchan, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and E. M. Forster. This section details the racial and gendered complications arising from the colonist's attempt to fetishize native and hybrid figures, a process which ultimately leads to a re-evaluation of the colonial presence in the new landscape. The second half of my work discusses the fetish in Asian American narratives. Like the British colonial texts, Asian American narratives also reinvent the American landscape, but the consequences of relocating the fetish on the racialized figure takes a decided twist when Asian American identity is already exoticized by American culture. I examine the allure of America in the Asian American immigrant fiction of Anjana Appachana, Bharati Mukherjee, and Maxine Hong Kingston. By looking at how the conception of geography and the decision to immigrate is mediated by the development of a racialized fetish, I show how cross cultural discourse in an international context influences the construction of America, and how the production of Asian American identity is driven by material and psychological commodifications of cultural traditions.