The Asian American object: Aesthetic mediation and the ethics of writing (Eileen Chang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje)

This dissertation argues that the political and ethical objectives of Asian American Studies have determined the ways in which its object of analysis has been constituted. I contend that the field's investment in identity politics has resulted in reading practices that privilege a normative realism while consistently overlooking the significance of the aesthetic as a cognitive mode. As a result, literary works are typically interpreted in a manner that is unable to account for the non-mimetic aspects of language. Drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, and others, I theorize the significance of literature in Ethnic Studies and argue for the centrality of aesthetic mediation in the production of knowledge.; Through readings of texts by Eileen Chang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, and Michael Ondaatje, I trace how their mimetic logics are ruptured by the intrusion of aesthetic figures and practices. I read Chang's anti-Communist novel, The Rice-Sprout Song (1954) by focusing on her engagement with propaganda as a pseudo-aesthetic practice that conflicts with the demands of realism. I argue that she undermines the ethnographic expectations of her readers by re-defining realism in terms of sensuality and psychological complexity. In the next chapter, I examine how musical tropes articulate the values of community formation in Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989). By tracking how music is subsequently "transcribed" into signifying language, I show how her engagement with the act of writing demonstrates an understanding of US multiculturalism that differs from prevalent materialist critiques of the same. In my final chapter, I read Lee's A Gesture Life (1999) along with Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost (2000) and show how these novels explore the relationship between historical memory and identity formation. I contend that both texts turn to aesthetic modes in order to articulate the ethical stakes and utopian possibilities of identity.