This dissertation discusses contemporary U.S. women’s literature in the context of
women’s struggles with nation and nationalism, examining how Leslie Marmon Silko,
Gloria Naylor, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Nora Okja Keller contest articulations of
gender, ethnicity, and cultural affiliations in terms of the dynamics of national inclusion
and exclusion. Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Naylor’s Linden Hills (1985), Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior (1976), and Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) were written at the
crossroads between contemporary feminisms and nationalisms and reveal women’s
centrality to national projects. Approaching these four literary texts not only as cultural
narrations of nation but also as critical engagements between feminism and nationalism,
this dissertation argues that postnational and/or transnational politics are manifest in
these women writers’ articulation of women’s liminality between their cultural nations
and the U.S. The chapters that follow analyze how women writers narrate the nation in
various contexts while reinscribing women as subjects of national agency and the U.S. as
a transnational and postnational site of contending memories and national narratives. Chapter II examines a possible women’s nationalist attempt to de-essentialize the nation
by reading Silko’s Ceremony. Silko provides a hybrid narration of the nation that
challenges the full blood subjects’ hegemonic model of Native American cultural
nationalism. Silko, however, uses the gendered rhetoric of nation-as-women and denies
women as national subject. Chapter III moves to a critical standpoint on cultural
nationalism through reading Naylor’s Linden Hills. Tackling the unmarked status of
masculinity in Silko’s project, chapter III examines how Naylor problematizes the
gendered foundations of the African American cultural nation and deconstruct her
contemporary African American cultural nationalism. Chapter IV discusses Kingston’s
The Woman Warrior as a literary supplement to hegemonic history of the U.S. and Asian
America and as a feminist corrective to masculinist narrations of the nation. The last
chapter discusses the possibilities of transnational feminist coalitions through reading
Keller’s Comfort Woman. In their feminist, transnational, or postnational critiques of
nationalisms, women writers demonstrate that it is not possible to reimagin the nation
without feminism and textually embody the significant contributions of feminism to
contemporary liberatory movements.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2505 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Park, Mi Sun |
| Contributors | Matthews, Pamela R. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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