| This dissertation discusses themes such as translation in the reimagining of myth through storytelling, transformation in the production of cultural identities through "play," and transculturation in the syncretization of cultures through travel and migration. Chapter one examines how Maxine Hong Kingston, Larissa Lai, and Hiromi Goto redefine in their texts, The Woman Warrior, When Fox Is a Thousand, and Chorus of Mushrooms, the relationship between memory and narrative through the dialogic art of storytelling in their quest of reconstructive myth-making and poetic-revisioning and how the process of rewriting and reimagining the past necessarily deconstructs the original intent of achieving an "imaginary plenitude" precisely because of the nature of language: the unreliability of orality in storytelling and the treacherous act of translation. The emphasis in the second chapter is on the production, rather than the representation, of cultural identities, a process of never ending fragmentation, distancing, and alienation, a process of knowing, understanding, and becoming through the acting, performing, and playing out of roles. The four texts in the second chapter, Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee, The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi, Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston, and The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, all contain elements of theatre and have actors as their protagonists; discourses of identity are the processes by which these characters negotiate spaces for selfhood, meaning, and survival. Ultimately, metamorphosis and role-playing serve as forceful metaphors for the translational condition of the diaspora. Finally, the third chapter explores the interconnectedness of different traditions as well as the translation, transformation, and transculturation that come with travel and migration in the texts of Amitav Ghosh, The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, and The Calcutta Chromosome, and in Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World. In these texts, one discovers an intricate interweaving of narrative structures and cultural boundaries and ways of re-reading and reimagining nations and narrations as forms of cultural translation. |
