| This dissertation takes as its starting point a series of debates in Asian American critical literature around the issue of authenticity--the "real" and the "fake"--in cultural and historical representation. I argue that the struggle to claim for oneself the position of "authentic" Asian American and to expose others as "fakes," reveals important assumptions and anxieties about gender, the family, authority and historical representation."The Memory Village" is an attempt to write an alternative Asian American history, one which eschews the dependence on "authentic" generational transmission and instead recognizes the ways in which history is written as a series of fictions, often necessary ones, in response to the equally powerful fictions of racism, xenophobia and exploitation. In this project, I am concerned with the histories and fictions created by Asian American artists including Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, David Henry Hwang, Fae Myenne Ng, Bharathi Mukherjee, Shu Lea Cheang, Jessica Hagedorn, Mira Nair and Lana Lin. I argue that these novelists, filmmakers and videomakers complicate or subvert the imperative of authenticity by fashioning narratives in which the articulation of the past is re-created and re-theorized through the fictional processes of memory, fabrication and imagination.These narrative explorations respond to an historical and artistic tradition in which Asian American experience, particularly women's experience, has been systematically elided, ignored or represented as a single, seamless entity. Both individually and collectively, these texts suggest new ways of representing and understanding the past through the "real" and the "fake" narratives surrounding it. |
