Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Auburn University, 2006. / Abstract. Vita. Includes bibliographic references.

Thesis--University of Chicago. / Bibliography: leaves 57-66.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Iowa, 1932. / Without thesis note. Bibliography: p. xxxii-xii.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Alliant International University, San Francisco Bay, 2003. / Adviser: Valata Jenkins-Monroe. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 49-50).

Magister Artium - MA / The literature of the Chinese diaspora in America is marked by a tension between ancestral Chinese traditional culture and the modernity of Western culture. This thesis explores diaspora theory, as elaborated by Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Gabriel Sheffer and others to establish a framework for the analysis of key Chinese American literary works. Maxine Hong Kingston's seminal novel, The Woman Warrior (1975), will be analysed as an exemplary instance of diasporic identity, where the Chinese cultural heritage is reinterpreted and re-imagined from the point of view of an emancipated woman living in the West. A comparative analysis will be undertaken of Jade Snow Wong's The Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950) and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989) to identify links between the writers who have grappled with various forms of diasporic identity in their works. An important part of this analysis is the representation and adaptation of Chinese folklore and traditional tales in Chinese American literary works.

The potential confrontation of Oriental and Occidental values represents one of the most important topics of scholarship since the twentieth century. Within this debate, American-born Chinese female writers occupy a unique position in their preoccupation with the two seemingly irreconcilable cultures. On the one hand, their Western upbringings entices the distortion of China from an Orientalistic perspective, on the other hand, they find their desire to come to terms with their ethnic cultural heritage to be equally difficult to supplant. It is a dilemma which sparked conflicts even within the Chinese American community, and begs the redefinition of the Chinese American female identity. It is thus, by applying Simone de Beauvoir’s ethical notions about Self/Other relations to the writings of Chinese American female writers, I consider how subjectivity is not substantive but a situated experience of selfhood in movement, and argue that Chinese American female writers may still be internalizing and perpetuating oriental stereotypes in their works, when they too have started re-orienting and hence, re-orientalising China and their Chinese identity. The United States of America is to Chinese American women as alienated at times as China. Under the framework, I further consider the futility of disputing the dual identity of Chinese American female writers to the extent to which identity can be considered as an ambivalent and ambiguous notion that has a temporal element in it. As a writer writes first and foremost about his or her own singular experiences in relation to the world, this thesis tackles the above question by examining how elements of anguish, solitude, and death, as noted by Beauvoir, and that are often present in Chinese American female writers’ accounts of their singular experiences, connect them to others. Through the evocation of such elements to establish the connection between Self and Other, which constitutes the authenticity of self-expression as opposed to suppression of self-assertion, one’s struggle with separation and one’s own truth is represented. In this sense, it is not, the ultimate result or triumph of an individual’s struggle with unity or individuality that matters; but rather, the process of self-struggle that corresponds to the dignified human existence within Beauvoir’s philosophical framework. The three elements of situation anguish, death and solitude are dealt with in this project in the following context: in Chapter Two, Ann Mah’s anguish over Chinese and American food is examined in connotation to the relations of herself with others around her that coerces her to reflect upon her ethnic and cultural affiliations. In Chapter Three, death is explored through the discussion of the footbinding notion in which the death of the foot signifies the end of docile acceptance as well as the beginning of transformations. Solitude is elucidated in Chapter Four through Maxine Hong Kingston’s warrior woman conceptualization that adopts and later re-orientalises silence. In all three situations, I pay attention to the way re-orientalisation is achieved in the Chinese American female project of selfhood in movement towards the Other. / published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Thesis (D. Min.)--Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, 1988. / Abstract. Bibliography: leaves 262-264.