A Representation Of Ethnic Subjectivity In Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese From The Perspective Of Visuality

Comprised of exterior cultural and political functions constructed by the social,and interior capacity to affect and influence human beholders,visuality has been recognized as the centrality to understand the visual culture studies.This thesis aims to explore the representation of ethnic subjectivity in Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese from the perspective of visuality.It finds that the three seemingly unrelated storylines of Jin Wang,Chin-Kee,and the Monkey King are depicted by Yang in three different "ways of seeing" which together reveal the process of constructing Jin's ethnic subjectivity.In Jin's narrative,firstly,we can see his inferiority complex is gradually completed and rendered natural through Nicolas Mirzoeff's visual techniques:classifying,separating and aestheticizing.Secondly,the grotesque representation of Chin-Kee,in W.J.T.Mitchell's image-as-organism concept,functions as a zombie-like image which visualizes the long-time anguish of Chinese diaspora who have suffered from the stereotypes held by Anglo-Americans for hundreds,and then forces Jin to recognize that these stereotypes are precisely fabricated and distorted by the visual media.Thirdly,it is Sun Wukong's multistable image,according to Mitchell's third type of metapicture,that allows Yang to create a shoeless Monkey King who absorbs both Eastern and Western mythologies,not only imparting the great importance of self-acceptance to Jin,but also highlighting his hybrid identity.In conclusion,this thesis argues that by employing different ways of visual representation,Yang not only describes the whole process of which Jin,as a Chinese American adolescent,suffers from self-denial,then recognizes the distorted images of Chinese,and finally accepts his ethnic legacy;but also emphasizes the possibility of a hybrid identity for Chinese Americans who can be American but in their own Chinese way,hence the construction of ethnic subjectivity.