'To be or not to be'...is that the question? Race and identity transformations in Asian American literature.

Abstract

In my dissertation I have attempted to reenvision how six Asian American authors conceptualize subjectivity as a both a contested site of racialized and gendered markings influenced by ideological apparatuses of power as well as a site of disruption of these interpellating systems. Such a subject is constituted by ideology, yet still able to perform unconscious or conscious acts of agency. That is, the authors in my dissertation examine how their respective protagonists perform or do identity in dialogical relation to the discursive processes of race, gender, and identity. Drawing from Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation and Judith Butler's notion of performativity, I argue that in the works of Sui Sin Far, Jade Snow Wong, John Okada, Monica Sone, Mitsuye Yamada, and Wanwadee Larsen, while the subject/character occupies dialogical, multiple positions of interpellation or to use John Mowitt's phrase, multiple interpellations, the subject resists being subjugated by ideology when he or she interrupts or turns aside from being hailed or called in subtle and direct ways. In thoughtful and nuanced conceptualizations of race and identity, these authors map how subjects (individual or collective) perform and reinvent their identities---a complex, iterative process that is interleaved with the characters' lived experiences as well as their spaces within specific historical configurations. The spaces between these multiple interpellations lie the potentially subversive sites where the characters can transform and reenunciate their own subjectivities. What emerges in these literary narratives is a subjectivity that is fragmentary, discontinuous, and multiple. In a sense, my dissertation explores through historical and generic contexts how these authors represent the subjectivities of their respective protagonists not simply as performers of ideology, but as shifting multiple-subject positionalities.