Asian-American women writers: Theorizing transnationalism

Asian American Women's Writing: Theorizing Transnationalism examines how several works by Asian American women postulate a new national identity and community, a transnationalism, that goes beyond the gendered binary oppositions of colonizer/colonized, First World/Third World, and West/East which have traditionally constituted American national identity in the modern period. Placing Asian American literature within postcolonialist and postmodernist debates in Chapter One, I argue that Asian American women's literature participates in theorizing postmodernity. Though transnational subjects create communities that are, like the strategies of multinational capital, multiple, dynamic, and flexible, I seek to emphasize how transnationalism undermines rather than depends upon and exploits the nation-state by redefining the concept of home.;Chapter Two examines the intersections of cultural modernism, colonialism, and national literature. I analyze Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946), and Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945), which explicitly deal with national identity and its formation in relation to contemporary Asian American literary production.;The third chapter considers how Asian American literature has confronted hegemonic nationalism and negotiated emerging U.S. postcolonial identities. I look closely at critiques of racist, patriarchal national identity in John Okada's No-No Boy (1957) and Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls (1987) where exile and internal colonization are represented.;Chapter Four defines transnational identity as that which incorporates feminist and postmodern concepts of subjectivity to problematize the idea of "home." Using various permutations of the picaresque mode, Cynthia Kadohata's The Floating World (1989), Fae Myenne Ng's Bone (1993), and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters (1990) represent characters or practices which challenge the concepts of national cultures and literatures, center-versus-margin paradigms of knowledge production, and the relationship between home and national affiliation.;The final chapter examines transnational communities in poetry and fiction: I analyze cultural exchange between the first and third Worlds in Cathy Song's Picture Bride (1983); epistemological communities in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee (1982); and the place of difference in community identity in Karen Tei Yamashita's Brazil-Maru (1992).