Living death: Loss, mourning, and ethnic renewal in contemporary American fiction

Living Death argues that the death of a beloved family member, a prevalent narrative feature in contemporary ethnic novels about immigrant families, comes to represent the accumulated traumas associated with ethnicity and assimilation in American society: losses of inherited culture, connection to ancestors, knowledge of the past, dreams, identity, “home,” language, and belief in America’s promises. As a result, the processes of grief demanded by this death necessarily involve the mourning of more than one body, more than one life. Loss and marginalization result in “living death,” spiritual and social deaths, which must be mourned to revitalize ethnic identities and heritages previously suppressed, denigrated, or rejected in the process of Americanization. The dissertation also illuminates a distinction between ethnicity and race suggested in the fiction in relation to loss and marginalization; while spiritual and psychological aspects of living death arise from crises of cultural transmission, the compounded trauma of social death is integrally related to race. Drawing on studies of mourning and melancholia, trauma, racialization, and nation, Living Death explores the creative and culturally specific processes of mourning instigated by the sudden death of a loved one in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, and Carole Maso’s Ghost Dance. It shows that second- and third-generation narrators, confronting the losses and hardships of their parents’ lives, work through haunting traumas in order to reconstitute a relationship with the aspects of ancestral heritage that can guide one in American life. The narrator in each of these four novels enacts a literary commemoration of familial loss and marginalization that enables recovery (or recreation) and reevaluation of disregarded and/or discarded histories and cultural identities. Rather than insisting on a severance of ties to lost objects, the mourning undertaken in this fiction tends toward reestablishing ties to the past in such a way that the past is put to service in the present. Knowledge of the past is used to give meaning to the present and to provide a ground from which to create new possibilities for the future.