Even if their presence is only temporary, diasporic individuals are bound to disrupt the existing order of pre-structured communities they enter. Plenty of scholars have written on how identity is constructed; I investigate the power relations that form when components such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, class, and language intersect in diasporic and transnational movements. How does sexuality operate on ethnicity so as to cause an existential crisis? How does religion function both to reinforce and to hide one's ethnic identity? Diasporic subjects participate in the resignification of their identity not only because they encounter (semi)-alien, socio-economic and cultural environments but also because components of their identity mentioned above realign along different trajectories, and this realignment undoubtedly affects the way they interact in the new environment. To explore this territory, I analyze Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, Peter Bacho's Cebu, Linh Dinh's "Prisoner with a Dictionary" and "'!'," and Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land.

This study examines Asian American identity construction in drama exercised by Asian American theatre companies on the mainland from the 1970s to the present. I use the term “wave” for the classification of the plays to illuminate artistic movements. The plays are classified into four waves: the first wave in the 1970s, the second wave in the 1980s, the third wave in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the fourth wave since the 2000s. The characters’ self-identification in these plays varies over time in response to historical, socio-political, economic, and cultural circumstances. Through chronological exploration, this dissertation articulates that Asian American self-identification and representation have developed from a rigid identity pursuing a single, coherent identity to a fluid identity beyond the binary frame by embracing other contingent and salient factors of identity. In addition, my dissertation illuminates that more dramatists use non-realist styles, especially in the third and the fourth waves, to reflect the American perception of anti-Asian racism and Asian American internalized racism. The illustration of Asian American dynamics that strive to form and evolve their identities challenges racial discourses and myths, opposing stereotypes.

In Creating the Language of Peace: Peace, War, and Art in the Works of Maxine Hong Kingston, I explore how this Chinese American writer pursues the creation of peace in her writings and life. These chapters explore Kingston's discussion of war and her determination to create a language of peace through creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Her works draw our attention to the ubiquity of war in our lives and furthers her endeavor to highlight this as well as her struggle for peace against the backdrop of an American pro-war political landscape. Creating the Language of Peace will be the first book length treatment of these topics across Kingston's career. It also considers Kingston's oft-expressed intention to create peace through artistic means, in her case, through writing. This dissertation will fill the gap in research and analysis, refocusing the discussion on the themes and issues Kingston has repeatedly indicated are vital to understanding her work: peace, war, art, and the creation of a language of peace. Throughout, I consider Kingston's development of a language of peace, her explorations of war and its consequences, the influence of her Buddhist philosophies, the close compatibility of her works with contemporary peace theory, and the possibility for peace poetics within her poetry. The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980) are the focus of chapter one, an investigation into Kingston's first analyses of war and its consequences for all who are touched by its violence. Chapter two takes the novel Tripmaster Monkey (1989) and compares Kingston's pacifist choices with Johan Galtung's peace theory. Thich Nhat Hanh's version of engaged Buddhism and its influence on both Kingston's The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) and her peace activism is explored in chapter three. The final chapter turns to her two books of poetry, To Be the Poet (2002) and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (2011), exploring how the role of the American poet as a political voice develops in her poetry.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the lock icon and filled out the appropriate web form. / A collection of short stories. / 2031-01-01T00:00:00Z

This project examines the connection between the representations of Chinese American women and the Orientalist discourse, as depicted in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Using a deconstructive and intersectional approach, the project focuses on four interconnected constituents that regulate the novel’s main structural and thematic elements: Narrative Structure; Mother-Daughter Relationships; Language, Writing and Identity; and Feminist Affirmations. The project’s aim is to understand the logic of the novel’s representation by juxtaposing and analyzing the contrasting arguments within each of the sections. Though somewhat inconclusive, this project addresses the ambiguity of Tan’s work in hopes of expanding the critical understanding of the novel.

Increasingly, postcolonial scholars are recognising that the discipline must move beyond the mere critique of European imperialism, and that the future lies, in part, in seeking solutions to the conflicts and injustices that remain the persistent legacy of the colonial era. A concurrent trend in literature departments has been the push to incorporate and encourage comparative methodologies. This essay brings into conversation two works of Asian American fiction that address the problematics of transnational encounter in the age of globalisation. In both Ha Jin's "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town" and Lawrence Chua's Gold by the Inch the authors explore familiar postcolonial themes: Western economic and cultural hegemony, cultural imperialism, the legacy of the Euro-American colonial era - yet they do so from a very particular (and increasingly common) perspective that as yet has not been sufficiently addressed by postcolonial scholars. Reading these texts through the lens of Roger Célestin's theorisation of the limits of traditional literary exoticism in From Cannibals to Radicals, this essay calls for a re-evaluation, not merely of our understanding of literary exoticism, nor merely of our understanding of the transpacific as a political imaginary, but also of our long-held conceptions of national literature and comparative scholarship.

Increasingly, postcolonial scholars are recognising that the discipline must move beyond the mere critique of European imperialism, and that the future lies, in part, in seeking solutions to the conflicts and injustices that remain the persistent legacy of the colonial era. A concurrent trend in literature departments has been the push to incorporate and encourage comparative methodologies. This essay brings into conversation two works of Asian American fiction that address the problematics of transnational encounter in the age of globalisation. In both Ha Jin's "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town" and Lawrence Chua's Gold by the Inch the authors explore familiar postcolonial themes: Western economic and cultural hegemony, cultural imperialism, the legacy of the Euro-American colonial era - yet they do so from a very particular (and increasingly common) perspective that as yet has not been sufficiently addressed by postcolonial scholars. Reading these texts through the lens of Roger Célestin's theorisation of the limits of traditional literary exoticism in From Cannibals to Radicals, this essay calls for a re-evaluation, not merely of our understanding of literary exoticism, nor merely of our understanding of the transpacific as a political imaginary, but also of our long-held conceptions of national literature and comparative scholarship.

How has the concept of masculinity been revised and adapted by different writers over the course of the early to mid-20th century? How and why did the authors respond to the question of masculinity differently? To answer these questions, this dissertation navigates the contested nature of masculinity in works spanning the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. I juxtapose two to three writers and their selected works in each chapter divided by the authors’ race and ethnicity: William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Richard Wright by focusing on Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, and Native Son respectively; Mike Gold’s Jews without Money and Nathanael West’s A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel; Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart. The writers I examine present masculinities that deviate from hegemonic masculinity, challenge and/or reinforce the definition and parameters of hegemonic masculinity, and develop models of masculinity that meet the needs of their specific historical moments. I argue that juxtaposing different modalities of masculinity construction and exploring the multifaceted treatment of American masculinity afford a more comprehensive perspective about the avenues through which masculinity is made manifest. My examination of multiple masculinities reveals the processes of establishing, maintaining, and contesting hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, tracking historical changes in masculinities uncovers how a set of essentialized traits, though changing, have transformed into and manifested as a privileged form of masculinity. / English

No description available.

No description available.