Antipodes of Asian American literature: heterolingualism and the Asian Americas

2012-04-24This dissertation frames a series of Asian American texts that are written in Spanish and/or that cite Asian diasporic lives in South America, and investigates the ways in which they challenge the implicit singularities of North America and the English language as premiere locales for Asian American literature. For critics of traditionally Anglophone Asian American literature and its putatively organic emergence within the geo-cultural boundaries of North America, the “foreignness” and potential confusions introduced by these texts’ castellano and invocations of Asian American Others allow for readings that do not gravitate toward representations of the exceptional Asian American who manages (or fails) to accede to voice as a dissonantly singular individual, citizen-subject or cultural hybrid. The trope of “coming-to-voice” need not be a compulsory crucible for, but rather a point of view of, subjectivation within Asian American literatures. Due to the wider and more discrepant ranges of scholarship necessary to make sense (and nonsense) of the Asian Americas and its unwieldy linguistic, historical, and cultural terrain, a purview of “the entire hemisphere from the Yukon to Patagonia,” as Kirsten Silva Gruesz puts it, is well equipped to identify not only Asian American literature’s originary axioms of U.S. and North American exceptionalism, but also its Anglophonicity and prioritization of the liberal subject who steers herself toward individual self-awareness. ❧ Rather than assimilate the authors investigated here—Anna Kazumi Stahl, José Watanabe, Siu Kam Wen, Julia Wong Kcomt, Joan Didion, and Pedro Shimose, among others—as exemplary writers of an Asian Latin American hybrid individuality that iterates a dual-culture or dual-world schema, this project tracks the palpable foreignness and conspicuousness of language in their writings. Drawing in particular upon the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, it reckons with Asian American texts as muddled fertilities rather than panethnic additions to Asian American heterogeneity. In a de-emphasis upon the location of representative Asian American authors of Latin America, and upon reading in ways that tend toward the biopolitical (the “dimension or the level at which human life is inscribed, constituted, recognized, and defined within a given sociopolitical order,” as Gabriel Giorgi and Karen Pinkus define it), the following chapters promote a vigilance toward destabilizations of the monolingual and geographical bounds of traditional Asian (North) American literature, and a watching out for irruptions that render the imprecision and ambiguity of another identificatory location: that of the Asian American as an evident subset of the liberal human