Species of afterlife: Translation and displacement in twentieth-century Chinese-English contexts.

This dissertation is divided into two main parts. In the first, I examine the cultural politics of translation and the discursive production of foreign identity on two fronts: the ways in which Americanness is received and interpreted in post-Cultural Revolution China, and the ways in which Chineseness is constructed in contemporary international venues, particularly English-language ones. In the second part, I turn to Asian-American writings of roughly the same period. Here I explore the ways in which the Asian-American diaspora imagines its own origins, with primary focus on the literature of Chinese-American writers and their negotiations of Chineseness. I discuss three specific moments: (1) Arthur Miller's 1983 staging of Death of a Salesman in Beijing and the cultural politics around the handling of western imports in post-Mao theater; (2) the international media's mythologizing of 2000 Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian, particularly how Gao came to be translated as the dissident and exilic Chinese writer par excellence, even as his Chineseness was repudiated by mainland authorities and hence by the language in which he still writes; and (3) the forking paths along which origin is fictionalized by contemporary diasporic American writers, with primary attention given to Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Ha Jin. As a disciplinary engagement, this dissertation is an attempt to read the Asian-American hyphen backward and forward---to bring together into one project episodes and issues of concern to both Asian Studies and Asian-American Studies, to elucidate the mutual relevance of these two fields. Theoretically, this dissertation reflects on larger philosophical implications of displacement through the writings of Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, and Walter Benjamin. All the moments I examine involve traveling texts and/or dislocated bodies, and these instances of displacement, I argue, manifest an idea of afterlife. The potential for a work, a literary identity, and even an entire people to be transplanted and translated, to inhabit a mode of being not confined to material presence, is what I hypothesize as the ontological dimension of the human.PhDAmerican literatureAsian literatureCommunication and the ArtsComparative literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsTheaterUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124843/2/3163848.pd