Creating race: Genre and the cultural construction of Asian-American identity.

This dissertation examines the ways in which genre plays a constitutive role in the construction and expression of Asian American identity through three site-specific case studies of Asian American identity in film, literature, and museum exhibits. Genre studies offers a way to talk about the influence of the historical moment on the artist, the artist's work and the reader, spectator, or patron, while never reducing the work to a simple reflection of social forces. Rather than asking whether genre hides a true or essential self, ideologically based genre studies approaches identity from the opposite direction. My search is not for the self behind genre but for the identity manifested by and through the mediating effects of genre. Vietnam War Films, Japanese American travel writing, and Asian American museums--all three genres mark the articulation of newly emerging Asian American identities through institutionally codified arenas, arenas with well developed, widely shared generic conventions. After an introductory chapter mapping out the relationship of race, identity and genre, I turn to American Vietnam War films, particularly Rambo and The Deer Hunter, and the role anxieties over whiteness, masculinity and immigration play in dominant portrayals of Asians in American film. The remaining chapters focus on Asian American self-representation. I begin with a look at contemporary Japanese American travel writing, such as David Mura's Turning Japanese and Kyoko Mori's The Dream of Water, interrogating how the writers invent a post-modern, global identity through this most colonial of genres. The dissertation concludes with a survey of Asian American museums, such as the Museum of the Chinese in America in New York and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Reading the codes of conduct appropriate to museums as generic conventions, I take a comparative look at several museums in order to locate the place of history and the private self in the racialized community identity represented in Asian American museums. Ultimately, my interest is in the struggle to define an Asian American identity through or against genres that have historically neglected or excluded them. The focus is on the meanings generated by the interactions of different genres and sub-genres rather than the nature or structure of genre. This dissertation, then, studies the reconciliation of conflicting genres into a single work, an investigation which reveals the ways in which ideology reforms and reshapes itself in order to accommodate and integrate oppositional structures.Ph.D.American literatureAmerican studiesArt historyCommunication and the ArtsEthnic studiesFilm studiesFine artsLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130556/2/9732154.pd