Trans-spatiality as the horizon of the coming community: Ethico-ontology and aesthetics in Asian immigrant literature

This study centers on the potential scope and significance of trans-spatiality as a new literary concept. I employ the concept of trans-spatiality as a means of understanding Asian immigrants\u27 transnational experiences as represented by Asian immigrant writers in the Anglophone world. Trans-spatiality is a grounding term and methodological orientation, and its scope is relational and appositional. Thus, previous studies such as postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, diaspora studies, and globalization are related to trans-spatiality, but, in this dissertation, I strictly limit its use to an ethico-ontological and aesthetic understanding of Asian immigrant writers\u27 literary works. For this methodology, I explore and analyze various Western philosophers\u27 theories, especially Giorgio Agamben\u27s ethico-ontology. Also, I employ Édouard Glissant\u27s poetics of relation and commonplace (lieux communs) as well as Walter Benjamin\u27s constellation to transit this theoretical exploration to literary studies. In chapter one of my study, which follows a brief preface, I address Asian immigrants\u27 negative (animalized or Otherized) humanities by analyzing two Asian American poets\u27 poems and Glissant\u27s poem alongside a theoretical critique of Heidegger\u27s Western-oriented ontology and ethics. In chapters two and three, I analyze Chang Rae Lee\u27s Native Speaker and Joy Kogawa\u27s Obasan to discuss Lee\u27s trans-spatial beings in terms of coming community and form-of-life, and Kogawa\u27s aesthetic testimony of Japanese Canadians\u27 internment during WWII via artistic signs. The fourth chapter shifts away from trans-spatiality in America-centered and anthropocentric narratives to a clone-centered science fiction and the critical space created by Kazuo Ishiguro, an Asian English novelist. This chapter ends with aesthetic and ethical inquiries into the clone as artist as a cornerstone of the relations between life and art. In the last chapter, I take on the topic of the relations between life and art via an overarching image of a bowl with the void in the center as a form of constellation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha\u27s Dictée. I conclude this dissertation with a brief analysis of my own trans-spatial teaching experience