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A central concern of much of the emergent literature of Asian American women is the question of how identity is defined. Living in, and writing from, what has been called the 'between worlds' condition engenders an often contradictory and frequently shifting sense of identity in Asian American women's texts. The 'hyphenated identity' is further destabilised and complicated by gender. This precarious female subjectivity is often reflected textually through shifting narrative voices and fractured narratives. A self-consciousness can be detected in the relation between the structures of narrative and the construction of self. Conventional genre distinctions are often traversed so that in particular the demarcations between fiction and autobiography are challenged. I refract current theoretical discussions of identity and the processes of identity formation through a series of texts by Asian American women which are preoccupied to varying degrees with the question 'Who am I?’ Several possible answers are suggested to the question of where identity actually originates. They are: the maternal, language; physiognomy; 'home' and the prominent cultural marker of national identity. It is around these locations of cultural identity that I organise my analysis. Chapters One and Two introduce a discussion of the ways in which identity is negotiated in this group of texts, and analyse the ways that genre is used and abused by these writers to suit their purposes. Chapter Three addresses the prevalence of mother/daughter writing in this body of work, suggesting that in their depiction of alternative maternal-daughterly arrangements, several Asian American women writers actually challenge dominant analyses of the mother/daughter dyad. As I discuss in Chapter Four, linguistic identity is also a focus of extended interest for many writers, for whom bilingualism is an uneasy condition. In Chapter Five, I address the Asian American feminist re-writing of the body as signifier. The body is often a battleground of identity. Asian American women's texts repeatedly address the practice of reconstructing the body to project less racially marked identities, as part of a wider project of recovering a positive sense of self-identity. This emphasises the corporeality of identity as well as the connections between the internal and external body. Chapter Six stresses the roles of culture and the polity in defining and creating identities, through the culturally and legislatively defined identity afforded by citizenship. I argue that particular texts by Asian American women may be read as challenges to dominant constructions of national identity, constructions which sought to exclude certain Asian American groups at critical moments in American history. Chapter Seven addresses the dynamics of space and home, a preoccupation with the idea of return as fundamental to the negotiation of identity. The search for 'home', both as psychological construction and real location, is a recurrent preoccupation in many texts.

This thesis takes as its subject the superficial nature of the normative masculine gender role. To investigate the creation of this role I have attempted to bring some understanding of recent theorisation of the postmodern, and of gendered identity, to readings of selected contemporary fiction. I have chosen to focus on several contemporary American texts. In a bid to avoid essentialising masculinity ever further I attempt to embrace the self-reflexive way in which these novels are written in conjunction with the various postmodernisms posited by Fredric Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, John Frow and Jean Baudrillard. Despite differing in significant ways, these critics all explore the idea of multiple identities. The lack of fixity this multiplicity fosters ensures that masculinity as an intrinsic given becomes disputed. 'The dialogues this creates reveal a category that is insecure, mobile and fluctuating, regardless of attempts to present it as otherwise. 'The first novel looked at is 'Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. This narrative encourages the questioning of the 'standard' masculinity adopted in patriarchal society by displaying men vulnerable to Post Traumatic Stress disorder, hysteria and madness, due to the war in Vietnam and governmental law enforcement. Masculinity is portrayed as tentative, provisional and impossible to maintain to society's exacting requirements. Psychotherapy is shown to confusingly both offer a fixed and stable 'self, whilst also promoting the encouragement of potential multiple other' selves' . Don DeLillo's White Noise continues the search for these 'selves'. Jack Gladney's debilitating fear of death compromises his mental and physical health. His strivings to deal with this, whilst also fulfilling various strands of the desired male stereotype, are explored through life-threatening disasters, usually pre-empted by rapidly developing technology. Jack's career in academia raises questions about the circulation of knowledge and information. Like Vineland, White Noise also examines the role of the family unit as an inherent part of the enforcement of standardised identities. 'The Family', both in its domestic format and via its more violent reincarnation as The Mafia, plays a vital role in all of these texts. Within DeLillo's Underworld (Section Three), the protagonist's therapy brings him away from the influence of The Mob, transforming him from murderer to upstanding citizen. His career in Waste Management provides a metaphor for the text's exploration of the manner in which abject matter is expulsed as part of a bid to conform to societal requirements. I draw upon Julia Kristeva's work on abjection in this section. The ritualistic nature of what is discarded and what revered is further explored in the fourth novel, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. This text offers an extreme picture of the potential results of stereotypical containment, with a protagonist who is determined to hyper-conform. Patrick Bateman not only espouses the thorough commodification of society, he also strives to exceed every stipulation pertaining to consummate masculinity. Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama, provides the material for the final chapter, it offers a chilling portrayal of surface-obsessed society. Mediated images of celebrities provide role models for the characters' identity formation. Postmodernity's purported lack of depth is explored in the light of Baudrillard's theories. The potentialities of the cybernetic post-human are raised and discussed via the theorisation of Lyotard and Donna Haroway. The texts were selected for their usefulness in demonstrating a developing notion that rather than forming a new or extended sense of masculinity, men are acknowledging a growing awareness of the self-conscious, performative, indeed 'hyper', nature of any masculine identity. Contemporary films and television programmes are examined alongside the novels.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2003. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 204-215).

The Miami Freedom Tower was built during the 1920s and then used during the 1960s as a processing center for newly arriving Cuban refugees. This report will demonstrate the ways in which a particular, powerful segment of the Cuban American community used the tower as a means to establish for themselves a more positive, Euroamerican identity in the wake of the Mariel boatlift and in the context of national debates over immigration in the 1980s and 1990s. By first looking at the U.S. government’s establishment of Cuban American identity during the early Cold War as positive and ideologically aligned with the United States and then examining the ways in which that identity was challenged in the 1980s and 1990s, this report demonstrates that national and ethnic identities are constantly in flux. Further, it is necessary to break down and fully analyze the ways in which the identities of immigrant groups are framed both externally by the press, popular culture, and the government and internally by their own goals, conceptions, and histories. / text

People often express essentialist beliefs about race and nationality, viewing each as causally powerful and stable over time. However, do essentialist intuitions apply across intersectional categories? Here, across White-non-Latine (n = 197), White-Latine (n = 202) and non-White-Latine (n = 151) Americans, we find that essentialist beliefs about nationality differ based on participant race-ethnicity and the skin-color of the target American. In White-Latines and non-Latines, both white-skinned and brown-skinned targets’ “Americanness” were essentialized above chance, but white-skinned targets were essentialized at higher rates. However, non-White-Latines essentialized Americanness similarly in both white and brown-skinned targets. Further, only participants who essentialized Americanness in white-skinned, but not brown-skinned, Americans expressed greater warmth toward White immigrants over Latine immigrants. Those who essentialized Americanness equally in white- and brown-skinned targets showed no difference in warmth. These findings illustrate the importance of investigating cognitive precursors to prejudice through an intersectional perspective in ethnically diverse samples.

Under the latest presidential election in the USA debates of the national identity was one of the central topics, which have made the polarization between the parties wider. Today we know that people choose the media that sympathies with their opinion and turn from the media that challenge their political believes. By studying newspapers one can examine what they say about national identity and membership, which in turn shows which groups are represented in society. By using membership as a theory, the study gives a new theoretical approach and see if membership theory can describe how the American identity is described in newspapers. The study will analyze six American newspapers and ten articles per paper, in total of 60 articles. The method is describing analysis of ideas, which will be used to clarify and analyze how the newspapers are describing membership. All the newspapers are analyzed separately and, in the end, a comparative analysis between the papers is made. There are three major conclusions to been drawn. The first one shows a divided identity in USA, but all the papers have the same solution, it is the governments task to fix and restore the national identity. The second conclusion shows how divided the newspapers are from their ideological undertone from different points of views of membership. The third conclusion shows that all newspapers describe membership in different ways.

This essay seeks to explore the various representations of fatherhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Although The Scarlet Letter is Hawthorne’s most-studied text, very little critical attention has been paid to Hawthorne’s rendering of paternity in the story. This essay attempts to fill that void by examining the roles of the many father figures in the novel. I argue that Hawthorne’s anxiety about fatherhood, made manifest by his constant doubling and expunging of father figures, dominates the narratives of both The Scarlet Letter and “The Custom-House,” binding the texts together and providing the framework of the novel. The structure of The Scarlet Letter relies on Hawthorne’s continual introduction of potential fathers for Pearl, auditioning and discarding various paternal models – a process that carries implications both for Pearl, and for American fatherhood. I further contend that the figure of the absent father is a key thematic component of the American Renaissance as a whole, reflecting not only the authors’ personal fears, but also their anxieties about England’s paternal relationship to America – a concern that pervades the text of The Scarlet Letter. / text

Founded in 1932, the Department of Painting and Design, or “Studio,” at the Santa Fe Indian School was the first official, government-run boarding school program to promote pictorial paintings based exclusively North American Indian arts and culture. It was yet another program designed to bring about the assimilation of Indians into the economy and society of American, but progressive influences had introduced a change in orientation to Indian Policy by the beginning of the 1930s; instead of demeaning Indian cultures by demanding cultural assimilation, a beneficent stance was adopted that promoted them and their assimilation as American Indians into the ethnic diversity of society. As the Studio experience unfolded, it became a unique art world in which Indian artist-students from various cultures and non-Indian educators and patrons engaged in a cross-cultural effort to carry forward ancient Indian decorative arts to shape what became know as traditional modern American Indian painting. But the Studio also became a forum in which its young artists engaged in a cross-cultural search for an American art and identity with their non-Indian educators and patrons. As such, the Studio is a unique social microcosm for studying the nature and formation of the modern American identity of both its young Indian artists and of it non-Indian progenitors. This v study will examine the personal and collective identities that arose through this cross- cultural interaction during the formative years of the Studio – the tenure of its first “guide,” Dorothy Dunn, from 1932-1937. In order to gain a fuller understanding of the concept of identity formation, individual members of that art world are prominently portrayed against the background of BIA education policies concerning indigenous arts and the Studio’s unique historical position in that regard. A selection of 150 Studio paintings is examined to detect ways in which the artist-students chose to depict themselves and their cultures, i.e., their identities. And on that score, the Studio artist- students expressed themselves and their cultures, however marginal they were then and now to American society, and they shared with the non-Indians a new understanding of how they both were Americans. / text

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007. / Title from title screen (site viewed Feb. 19, 2008). PDF text: 217 p. ; 443 K. UMI publication number: AAT 3271923. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.