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Identity Switch: a Study on Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land

This thesis attempts to read ¡§identity switch¡¨ in Gish Jen¡¦s Mona in the Promised Land as an exploration to the Asian American experience veiled by the multiculturalist ethnic commensurability. The research is divided into three chapters: ¡§Sleeping Racist Lover,¡¨ ¡§There is no World without Race and Class Walls¡¨ and ¡§The Figments of the Cosmopolitan America.¡¨ In Chapter One, I try to read the protagonist Mona Chang as the American born kid with no ethnic consciousness resulting in the funny and naive identity switch as a means to escape her innate cultural perplexity. In Chapter Two, the hindrances of this switch are disclosed during the interethnic interactions as to argue the possible setbacks of identity switch and the Asian American¡¦s being alienated from hegemonic black-white relation. In the final chapter, two ethnic alliances set upon the ethnic equality as to resist to the white mainstream oppression are analysed in attempt to argue that the multiculturalist embrace of differences of the minorities eventually falls into a white-black power relation, thereby alienating and silencing Asian Americans. Lastly, I argue that the seemingly funny identity switch on a cosmopolitan intent to de-ethnicise America ultimately discloses the Asian Americans¡¦ dislocation in the land.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0119110-171250
Date19 January 2010
CreatorsCHANG, YI-FAN
ContributorsHsiu-chih Tsai, Min-hsiou Rachel Hung, Fu-jen Chen
PublisherNSYSU
Source SetsNSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0119110-171250
Rightsnot_available, Copyright information available at source archive

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