| This dissertation investigates the vital intersectionalities of Asian American literature, urban studies, and spatial theory. When I first began my studies in Asian American literature, I was surprised by the relative dearth of scholarship on Asian American identity and its relation to urbanscapes. As the debates arose in the nineties between domestically inclined critics and transnationally focused researchers, what seemed to be absent from these discussions was the importance of the local and how cities, in particular, help us to contextualize Asian American literature. My research examines recent Asian American novels (such as Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange) wherein writers have included representations of labyrinthine cities and local spaces. My analysis focuses on the concept of lost subjectivity, elucidating specifically how Asian American characters find themselves disoriented in the city and unable to find a stable sense of home. As marginalized figures bearing stories of trauma and suffering, these literary personages call attention to sociohistorically configured subject positions such as war refugees, queer prostitutes, the homeless, and liquor store owners, who are in danger of erasure, disembodiment, and death. Following the work of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre respectively, this dissertation argues that lost subjects employ spatial "tactics" to combat their disorientation through the creation of "counter-sites," locations that allow reinscription into the physical fabric of the city. However, characters often fail to achieve personal fulfillment, suggesting that Asian American identity exists in ever shifting tension with a given geography. My work engages analyses of urbanscapes ranging from New York and Los Angeles to Taipei, Saigon, and Manila. Tales of the Asian American in the cityscape continue to problematize Asian American identity not only in the discourse of the nation-state, but also in context of the larger global community. My larger project is to link the complex articulations of the urban space in both transnational and United States frames to the construction of Asian American identity. |
