"Mobility" and "home" are often assumed to be antithetical concepts. Visions of "mobility" and "home" are especially mediated through ideological mappings of gender, in which women are relegated to the local and the domestic as extensions of ideas of home, and men are assigned to the public terrain, the "outer" world. The dissertation not only seeks to problematize gendered ideologies of "mobility" and "home" but also investigates the ways in which "home" is redefined or reconfigured through different tropes of mobility. Through analysis of three novels, Bone by Fae Myenne Ng, Mulberry and Peach by Hualing Nieh and The Moon of Vancouver by Xiulan Du, I examine many implications of "home" that are fixated in binaries of domestic and public, male and female, East and West, and Asia and America. My study explores particularly the ways in which different tropes of mobility as conducted or imagined by the novelistic characters not only challenge the dichotomized understandings of "home" embedded in hegemonic structures of patriarchy, Orientalism, nationalism, imperialism and capitalism, but also redefine "home" in its relation with "mobility." Chapter One discusses gendered ideologies of "home" and "mobility" in both Chinese and Western cultures and outlines the major theoretical strands of my study. It also introduces the thematic connections of the three novels. Chapter Two explores the ways in which Ngs characters use different modes of mobility to re-map and re-imagine different "homes" and re-articulate their positions in them. Chapter Three analyzes how the constant mobility of Nieh's female protagonist reveals "home" as the locus of two conflicting desires and re-defines "feeling at home" as a perpetual state of reformation and negotiation. Chapter Four examines how capitalism on both a global and local scale affects transnational migration and the plans of settlement of Du’s characters.

As a generic study of literary utopia and Chinese utopian literature, this dissertation is mainly concerned with a refutation of generic confusion pervasive in critical studies of Chinese utopian literature, and the methodology owes much to cultural and literary semiotics. The preliminary chapters are dedicated to an investigation of the conventions indigenous to literary utopia. The paradigmatic inquiry in Chapter II helps to locate several codes pertinent to literary utopia through the articulation of an inter-generic dialogue among utopia and its neighboring genres. The syntagmatic inquiry in Chapter III, using late nineteenth-century American literary utopias as an appropriate example, pinpoints the genre's dynamic feature: it is the existence of a generic contract, through the articulation of an intra-generic dialogue, that guarantees the diverse texts as truly belonging to the genre. Investigations of the alleged Chinese utopian literature in Chapter IV has led to the conclusion that most celebrated Chinese utopias of the classical era are paradisiacal myths. It is not until the late Ch'ing (ca. 1840-1911) that, in an obscure body of literature, literary utopia typical of the genre emerges on the Chinese scene. Chapter V is devoted to a study of these late Ch'ing texts in the light of the generic conventions of literary utopia. The significance of this exploration lies in the discovery of the uniqueness of Chinese utopias: drastically different from their predecessors and much under foreign influence, late Ch'ing utopias still assume a distinct identity apart from their Western counterparts. This dissertation addresses problems related to thematic approaches to utopian literature in general and misconceptions in regard to Chinese utopian literature in particular.

The Nobel Prizewinner Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) wrote in Bengali and translated his own poems into English. Rabindranath's work in Bengali revolutionized the indigenous literary tradition, but little or none of his Bengali style is visible in the translations he produced for an English audience. He addressed a different reader when writing for the English, and an audience that he understood in a specific way because of the Anglo-Indian colonial context and the image that it presented of English language and its culture. Rabindranath had two distinct aesthetic and cultural ideologies, and he was aware of the radical split in this understanding of the Other, or of the British colonial presence in India. The present study examines the way that this ambivalence in comprehending the motivations of the colonizers was created and manipulated by colonial policies. Like many others of his generation, Rabindranath Tagore believed in the "ideal" presence of the English as it was represented in English literature. This faith generated a perception of two distinct kinds of English: the "petty" and the "great." While translating, he had in mind the constituency of the "great" English who formed an ideal world of culture. Towards the end of his life, he became disillusioned with the deceptive cultural transactions implied in colonial poetics.

This dissertation argues that friendship can enliven the revolutionary humanist politics of twentieth century anticolonial movements. Twenty-first century nationalism, including that of former colonies, extends the violence of empire and breaks from the visions of anticolonial revolutionaries, such as Frantz Fanon, who sought to overthrow imperial domination by also progressing beyond the nation-state. Through a study of friendships that emerge in the context of anticolonial struggle and form across racial, class, caste, national, gendered, and religious differences, I argue that friendship is crucial to the development of a politics rooted in the wellbeing of the global collective and oppositional to both colonialism and nationalism. The main focus of this project is South Asia. Taking the fortification of Hindu nationalism in postcolonial India as a departure point, I read a set of literary texts situated in the South Asian anticolonial context that depict friendships formed across racial, class, caste, national, gendered, and religious difference. I demonstrate how many of these friendships contest strict divisions between self and Other and the colonial, class, and nationalist structures that keep these divisions intact. I organize each chapter according to three spaces that recur in South Asian literature as crucial to the creation and mobilization of friendship across difference: the ship, the home, and the ashram. Moving between these three spaces, I argue that in the emotional bonds of friendship, we can trace the emergence of a collective politics—one that refuses the divisions of self and Other central to the projects of empire and the basis upon which contemporary nationalisms thrive. / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy / This project explores the anti-nationalist possibilities of friendship. Anticolonial revolutionaries of the twentieth century, such as Frantz Fanon, envisioned a humanist politics that refused the violence of both empire and the nation-state. Such a politics, rooted in the wellbeing of the global collective, has been lost in the proliferation of nationalisms in both former empires and colonies; however, I argue that the study of friendship can help enliven these collective politics. This project focuses on the political possibilities of friendships formed in the specific context of South Asian Independence movements. I read a set of South Asian literary texts that depict friendships established across racial, class, caste, religious, gendered, and national difference. Tracing these friendships as they take shape on the ship, in the home, and in the ashram, I ask: how might these depictions of friendships help reinvigorate a revolutionary, anticolonial politics that seeks to progress beyond the violence of the nation-state?

From the arrival of American ground troops to Vietnam in early 1965 to the fall of Saigon and the takeover by the North Vietnamese in 1975, Vietnam was America’s longest war. In Vietnam, as American bombing intensified, the people of Japan were remembering their own wartime past, who had themselves experienced heavy bombing, and they began to empathize with the Vietnamese people. Kaikō Takeshi, a novelist and journalist, attempted to understand the overwhelming traumatic events of his past during World War Two and these feelings were extended to all aspects of his Vietnam writing where the present is haunted by history. By examining Kaikō’s first Vietnam novel, Into a Black Sun, I will assert how his novel sets the stage for all his later writing and the touchstone for this novel is his catharsis for his war experience. He explores one of the characteristics found within the sub-genre of Vietnam War literature and writes about horror in a visceral way that uses all five of his senses to describe atrocity. I also explore how Kaikō utilizes these five senses, but primarily his sense of vision in order to comprehend the trauma of being in Vietnam. His experience in Vietnam caused the psychological blackness and darkness of his past to once again creep into his everyday life. I also discuss how Kaikō’s use of food imagery permeates throughout his works and how food has a lot of resonance for Kaikō because it relates to war and a past of starvation.

Like all of Shakespeare's works, The Tempest, Shakespeare's last play, has been translated into German and Japanese on numerous occasions. This thesis concerns itself with ten landmark translations of The Tempest, exploring them from a theoretical and historical point of view. The translations surveyed are those by Christoph Martin Wieland (1762), August Wilhelm Schlegel (1798), Heinrich Voß (1818), Richard Flatter (1952), Hans Rothe (1963), Rudolf Schaller (1971), Erich Fried (1984), Tsubouchi Shôyô (1915), Toyoda Minoru (1950), and Fukuda Tsuneari (1975). In The Tempest, Shakespeare's most consistently fantastic play, the Other is represented in magical terms. The results of this thesis suggest that in the translations, which are likewise a representation of the Other, the magical aspects become heightened. My analysis draws on a multitude of recent reconceptualizations of and approaches to translation. These include André Lefevere's description of translation as rewriting, Maria Tymoczko's concept of translation as a metonymic process, Lawrence Venuti's insistence on a translation's heterogeneity, Theo Herman's focus on translation as manipulation and as institution, Itamar Even-Zohar's idea of translation as systemic innovation, and Gideon Toury's emphasis on translators' norms. Chapter one gives the methodological groundings of this study. In order to explain what accounts for the comet's tail of translations that Shakespeare's writings have occasioned in German and Japanese, an outline of the modern history of these two vibrant translation cultures is given in chapter two. Chapter three is likewise an historical account, describing the major trends in Shakespeare reception in these two cultures. Chapter four presents the story of The Tempest and aspects of its critical and staging history. Chapter five investigates the literary language of The Tempest, arguing that Shakespeare's word magic is produced by what is always already a “translated” language. Chapter six delineates the ten translators' positions and strategies, their approaches to Shakespeare, and, where applicable, their specific appraisal of The Tempest. This chapter examines, moreover, how the translational practices of the various translators contribute to the construction of a narrative of national identity in the receptor cultures. In chapters seven and eight, five passages from The Tempest and their respective translations are examined, again with an emphasis on the supernatural and fantastic aspects. In the last chapter, the results are summarized and the rewriting of Shakespearean texts is placed in a global context.

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