Toward a more perfect union: Transnationalizing Asian-American and postcolonial studies

How are the relationships between race and nationhood to be understood in the contemporary, arguably postnational, world? How can academic scholarship explain and intervene in the continuities and transformations of literary and other cultural narratives, state apparatuses, and mechanisms of power that are (re)occurring? My dissertation engages with these issues by theorizing a union between the work of Asian American and postcolonial studies. I offer in it a model of transnationalism that recognizes what Ella Shohat has described as "schisms" between ethnic and postcolonial studies scholars consequent to the "rise of postcolonial studies in North American English departments" and a concomitant sense of displacement on the part of practitioners of ethnic studies. Through examination of literary and legal narratives, I describe a transnationalism that is both the product of and facilitates the forging of alliances between Asian American and postcolonial studies.;I argue that while U.S. postcolonial studies may take race and/or ethnicity into account at the global level of investigation, it inadequately considers the impact of imperialism on the domestic minority populations of a metropole such as the U.S. Equally problematic, on the other hand, is Asian American Studies' continued preoccupation with the claiming of an "American" identity without a critical evaluation of the U.S.'s international position as a 20th century imperialist power. Identifying the theoretical lacunae of postcolonial and Asian American studies in this way enables movement toward a union between them that consistently takes into account the inextricably linked matrices of identificatory categories and international dynamics a/effecting the constructions of both Asian Americans and of "Americanness" itself.