Identity Negotiation In Asian American Women’s Diasporic Fiction

In an age and global context where the speed and volume of migration have continuously increased,the processes and outcomes of contact and interactions between different cultures have diversified.These increases of intercultural contacts have not always generated positive and friendly relations.Instances of intercultural communicative failure show up in varied cultural conflicts,expressions of psychic depression,social displacement,or even conditions fostering war,and are increasingly expressed in literary works.An example is how both successes and failures of the migration experience are thematized in the emerging genre of Asian American diasporic literature created by Asian emigrants to the United States.The aim of the present study is to provide a way to understand the often unspoken,silenced history of the Asian diaspora experience in the U.S.as articulated in fiction,especially the experiences of suppressed ethnic women who are subordinated by the powers of a maledominated mainstream American society.The guiding assumption is that employing the communication study approach to “negotiating” can open the possibility of a new approach to examining dialogue between cultural spaces,and therefore provide a reading that is “intercultural” in nature.This dissertation consists of five parts and a conclusion.The Introduction describes the state of studies in Asian American literature both in China and abroad,building on the most common postcolonial and postmodernist identity theories of hybridity and fluidity.A new approach concerning the “negotiation” of transactional identity is generated as a theoretical underpinning for analytical interpretation.A variety of cultural/intercultural perspectives are applied in this focus on selected Asian American women’s diaspora fiction.The works selected are Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine(1989),Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World(1989),and Gish Jen’s The Typical American(1991)as well as Mona in the Promised Land(1996),to examine how their characters from several cultural origins search for meaning and struggle to find a cultural identity.For these selected authors and their works,the analysis seeks to address critics’ questions on their apparently optimistic narration of immigrant conditions or ignoring of the material realities impinging on Asian immigrants,especially regarding the role of race,class,and gender in the workings of identity politics in America.Chapter 1 briefly summarizes some relevant and influential identity theories developed in the context of intercultural communication that may prove useful for the analysis of identity problems in intercultural literary texts.Stella Ting-Toomey’s conceptualization of negotiation is explained as a transactional interaction process whereby individuals in an intercultural situation attempt to assert,define,modify,challenge,and/or support their own and others’ desired self-images,a concept strengthened by her emphasis on mindfulness.Building on Ting-Toomey’s concepts,Ronald Jackson’s “Cultural Contracts Theory” understands the negotiation of cultural identity as a bargaining process in which two or more individuals consider the exchange of ideas,values,and beliefs.These lay foundations toward a literary analysis of the negotiation of cultural identity.Chapter 2 explores how Bharati Mukherjee’s protagonist Jasmine struggles to pursue her cultural identity in a mindful adaptation effort within the host country.Jasmine’s journey is a trajectory from “object to subject”(Deepika Bhari),from ignorance to education,from passivity to sustained and active negotiation.By narrating Jasmine’s complex process of determined self-transformation and improvement of intercultural competence,Mukherjee shows Jasmine’s mindfulness in negotiating with the problems of cultural identity.Chapter 3 shows that in The Floating World Cynthia Kadohata depicts a dark history of being Japanese American in the era of post-internment.Here diasporic women paradoxically have to find a sense of belonging,security,and a home through constant mobility,as the title The Floating World suggests.Therefore,the protagonist’s home is situated in a dynamic space with a strongly imaginary dimension which needs novel forms of identity negotiation.Chapter 4 argues that Gish Jen seeks to redefine the identification process and its negotiating transactions further,without direct parallels in the other works.The young protagonist Mona’s choice of conversion to an activist variety of Reform Judaism indicates her attempt to reconcile an idealistic wish for improving her family’s social status with fulfilling her filial attachment and also a with desire for social reform.But the failure of “Camp Gugelstein” as a socio-ethnic experiment shows readers and Mona herself that fluidity in identity in connection with ethnic antagonism is selfcontradictory and collapses.Considering the depicted transformation of Asian cultural identities in the U.S.,an apparent freedom of options is haunted by underlying pressures on what seems to be personal choice;mobility and wandering is not conducive to finding a stable home but may paradoxically become a reshaped mode of discovering home and identity;it is difficult for characters to avoid traumatic disorder.Behind the theme of hybrid flexibility on the text surface,the fictional representations uncover and articulate Asian women’s struggle and suffering,depicting violence,uneasiness,and traumatic silencing—though this has not always or often been acknowledged in research.These conditions form the narrative context of Jasmine’s mindful adaptation and “trading off” her illegal exile in the U.S.,of Olivia’s search for a dynamic space of belonging in an ongoing practice of mobility,and of Mona’s,Callie’s,and Helen’s “rubbing off” processes which respond to typical American or Chinese stereotypes.By adapting several methods from intercultural communication,one can gain a more thorough understanding of the conditions of resistance against imposed power claims and the transactional requirements for shaping cultural identities in diasporic discourses.The narrative structure involves the reader.The fictional presentation appears to set up reading positions of which a careful reader,as narrative addressee,should grow aware.By gaining this awareness,and engaging with more than one presentational level,a reader becomes capable of challenging perceptions of the identity process gained at first sight.This enables narrative addressees to serve as active interlocutors who can independently judge what is narrated.