| This study is the first exploration of a trope in Asian American literature. Bracketing different forms of "ghosts" based upon the imperfect translation of the Chinese word for ghost, this analysis employs an interdisciplinary framework to examine canonical and non-canonical works in Chinese American, Japanese Hawai'ian, and Vietnamese American texts. These "ghosts" develop from diaspora and are entrenched in the cultural, linguistic, and racial contestations that accompany immigration. Together, "ghosts" function as a unique model for envisioning multiple dimensions of Asian American subjectivity.; In contrast to the part-imaginary, part-"real" existences understood to be ghosts in the work of (say) Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Poe, and James, this culturally- and linguistically-specific figure is first framed within the realm of spirituality as implied by its translation as "ancestor." Viewing ancestral "ghosts" through the work of cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz and Meyers Fortes calls attention to a thematic where ethnic history and memory are negotiated through the oppositional impulses of rejection (exorcism) and reclamation (possession) of spiritual forebears. In texts by Qui Duc Nguyen, Fae Myenne Ng, and Milton Murayama, this subnarrative places the intersection of individualism and family/tradition at the center of identity formation.; In Section Two, the translation of ghost as "foreigner" (white Other) implies a displacement from the spiritual to the material realm and reflects upon an asymmetrical power relationship between Asian American subject and "white" American. With the aid of post-colonial critic Homi Bhabha and ethnologist Werner Sollors, an examination of this reversal of (narrative) power reveals a portrayal of the other marked at three moments on a trajectory from assimilation to subversion.; Finally, in texts by Pardee Lowe, David Henry Hwang, and Maxine Hong Kingston, the untranslated term "kuei" is used in particular situations of intra-ethnic "ghosting," transferring the terrain of otherness from the physical body to the dialogical orbit. Through the work of semioticians and narratologists like Ferdinand de Saussure and M. M. Bakhtin, the interjection of the Chinese language lends insight into a variety of linguistic hybridity that questions notions of audience, literacy, voice, and subjectivity. |
