| This dissertation explores the relationship of modernist form to the suppressed histories of colonial modernity in the Taiwan and U.S. contexts. In order to do so it draws on theories of postmodernism, including critiques of philosophical essentialism and epistemological critiques of referential totality, and theories of postcoloniality, including historiographical interventions into Eurocentric theorizations of modernity and the notion of postcolonial "time difference." This dissertation also modifies present understandings of postmodernism by bringing a deconstructive critique of binary structures of knowledge into a consideration of the gendered contradictions of colonial modernity. It modifies postcolonial theory by bringing it into the East Asian and U.S. geo-political contexts. In the former case, the layered colonial histories of Taiwan, which include Japanese colonialism and Chinese domination, produce a "colonizer/colonized" relationship that is more multiple than the self/other relationship that has been theorized in other postcolonial locations. In the latter case, the disavowed imperialist enterprises of the pre-W.W.II. U.S. are also not adequately described by the self/other or metropolis/colony model because of many internal formations of colonially derived domination and labor exploitation.;This dissertation considers suppressed histories not to be similar in structure to the official, developmental narrative of modernity, but rather to inhabit a temporal disjuncture that is characterized by the historical and representational failure of meaningfulness. Allegory, as a non-developmental temporality that is nevertheless premised on historical responsibility, is theorized as a mode of articulation capable of bringing the histories of "third world," U.S. minority, and queer subjects into articulation, even as the convergence of multiple forms of domination preclude the possibility for realist representation of these histories. Modernist form is understood in light of this project as allowing for a disidentified, allegorical critique of the persisting legacies of colonial modernity. |
