Nearly twenty years have passed since the possibility of identifying as more than one race was made possible on the 2000 U.S. census. Much of the national discourse around the “browning of America”--the idea that the United States was rapidly becoming a minority-majority nation--has been celebratory; the mixed race subject, it seems, has left tragedy behind to become a new sign of national inclusion. Scholars of mixed race studies, however, have raised concerns over how such celebratory treatment eclipses a long and often troubling history of mixed race in the United States: tolerated under slavery and colonialism but elsewhere legally and socially proscribed. Through an analysis of representations of mixed race in Asian American literature, this project considers how centering on mixed race uniquely illuminates the contours of suppressed white monoracial identification that underwrites dominant American culture. Focusing specifically on representations of Asian American mixed race allows for a more nuanced discussion of the historical, cultural, and political nuances of mixed race that emerge when examined in light of a particular minority group. 

The first chapter considers how Diana Chang’s novel The Frontiers of Love deploys the emerging subjectivities of her central mixed race characters to expose classic psychoanalysis’ assumption of a monoracial family. Focusing on Aimee Liu’s Face, the second chapter discusses the ambivalence with which monoracial groups view mixed race subject, whose allegiance is understood as suspect. The third chapter examines how Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker offers a complex critique of mixed race as a form of biological assimilation. Grappling with the frontier myth as it relates to mixed race subjectivity, the fourth chapter contemplates the role that American expansionist narratives have played in the construction of mixed race identity as revealed in John Yau’s “Hawaiian Cowboy” and Nina Revoyr’s Wingshooters.

By deploying a cyberculture theory of cyborg politics in my literary analyses of Asian American literature, I deconstruct Asian American subjectivity through the trope of transnationality. In the Asian American transnational, I locate four prominent traits of Donna Haraway's socialist feminist cyborg: boundary transgression, the recognition and re-scripting of myth, simulations of identity, and coalitions of affinity. By adopting the language of cyberculture, I envision Asian American literature as a technologized textual landscape where narrative becomes virtual narrative such that we draw away from the static nature of a representational politics of identity in order to formulate articulations on a simulational politics of identity. Brian Massumi advocates privileging simulations of identity because unlike representations of identity that cannot move into the realm of the virtual due to being entrenched within a static grid of immobile significations, simulations allow us to imagine mobile concepts like movement, affect and sensation in the discourse of culture and power. Recognizing the Asian American transnational's propensity to transgress boundaries just as readily as the cyborg, I examine the transnational's capacity to recognize, reveal, and contradict hegemonic constructs that sustain the mythology of coherent subjectivity, seamless national identity and the U.S. nation as the democratic ideal. The indeterminate nature of the Asian American transnational limns how the racially-marked Asian American body contradicts, exacerbates and exceeds the circumscriptions of U.S. national identity. In five Korean American novels, I investigate indeterminacy in Korean American narrative and subjectivity such that it demonstrates the Kandice Chuh's suggestion to deconstruct Asian American subjectivities in order to formulate a more subjectless discourse. By deconstructing a particularized identity such as Korean American identity, I deploy my investigation in a language specific enough to make significantly concrete arguments for deconstructing Asian American subjectivity overall. Finally, I demonstrate the efficacy and cogency in formulating a critical language of affect into the discourse of literary scholarship due to my conviction that affect is not only a crucial space where we might imagine an emergent liberatory politics but that affect is also a critical tool where such a politics of movement and change can indeed materialize.

In her vital 2003 work, Imagine Otherwise, Kandace Chuh argues for an intervention in Asian American studies using a transnational analytic. As globalization increases in the twenty-first century, the continued movement of peoples, capital, and cultures across the Pacific Rim in myriad forms ranging from traditional immigration to new global digital networks demonstrates the importance of continuing the use of a transnational paradigm in Asian American studies. Moreover, within this specifically transpacific framework, this study specifically focuses on the role of visual culture, in the form of the global circulation of film and film images. As Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy have argued for African American cultural identity, it is within this global circuit of film that minority communities and individuals have constructed their myriad cultural identities. Thus, this study considers the ways in which Asian American minority subjects interact within this transpacific network of global circulation of film. In other words, this project sits squarely at this intersection of these three theoretical strands: the transpacific, the role of visual culture, and the creation of an Asian American identity.

Specifically, this study explores the various ways in which different works film and literature articulate both the realities and possibilities of new transpacific identities constructed within this web of global economic, political, and cultural exchanges. Moreover, in thinking about the role of movies and film is to also think about the distance between the spectacular nature of filmic imagery and the everyday lived reality of minority subjects. Furthermore, filmic imagery, especially the Hollywood film product that is the subject of this study, is often highly ideological, offering imagery and representations that both reflect and establish white hegemonic power and control. To this end, the novels of Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters, The Gangster of Love, and Dream Jungle serve to establish a paradigm for the relationship between film and its spectacular nature and the individual living in her quotidian reality. Thus, the different works in this study offer different ways in which individual identities are created both because of, and often in spite of, the spectacular constructions of Asians and Asian Americans.

Examining a diverse set of Asian American literary texts, this project explores the ways in which discourses of race, gender, class, sexuality and citizenship shape the articulation of emotions in Asian American Literature. While figures of the angry black man, the Latino gangster, and the Native American warrior abound in dominant American cultural narratives, Asian Americans have been constructed as the polar opposite: subdued, submissive, and accommodating. The figure of the angry Asian American remains a void in the dominant American cultural imaginary. One of the goals of this project is to interrogate and problematize the roots and implications of this absence. Placing anger within the historical, social and political contexts of war, colonialism, immigration and U.S. identity politics, I approach anger as a discourse that informs and shapes knowledge production and subject formation. The following questions animate my discussions: How is anger made legible in Asian American texts? What does anger suggest about the ways in which Asian Americans have been formed as subjects? How does anger complicate the notion of Asian American domesticity?

Via a comparative study of Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life and lê thi diem thúy's The Gangster We are All Looking For, chapter one examines the inextricable connection between Asian Americans anger and the model minority myth. Chapter two, by means of discussing David Mura's memoirs Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity, investigates the relationship between anger and Asian American masculinity. Examining Monqiue Truong's The Book of Salt and Susan Choi's American Woman, chapter three builds on recent scholarship on notions of melancholia and loss to explore anger's productive potentials. The discussion of anger's productive possibilities and limitations is extended in chapter four, which traces a genealogy of Chinese American women's anger in Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands.

Considering the double meaning of the word “domestic” as referring to both home and nation, this study examines how the imagined space of “home” for multiracial Asian American fictional characters reflects and produces contested meanings of being American. This project asks how multiracial characters’ search for spaces of belonging within and outside the U.S. nation-state uncovers disavowed histories of racialization, settler colonialism, and U.S. imperialism. Drawing on theorization and research from three academic fields—critical mixed race studies, U.S. colonialism and critical militarization studies, and spatial studies, I analyze eight late 20th and early 21st century Asian American fictional narratives that feature mixed race protagonists. By tracing the co-constitutive formation between racial and spatial imaginations, I approach works of realist fiction as cultural discourses whereby narrative spaces simultaneously describe and produce their material counterparts. This study demonstrates that although the post-Civil Rights multiracial movement has privileged heteronormative familial love to achieve social legibility for multiracial people, the domestic fractures and tensions in these contemporary narratives point to the limitations and contradictions of the familial/national domestic imaginary for mixed race Asian Americans and make visible the legacies of repressed histories of settler colonialism and imperialism. The chapters follow a spatial trajectory, where the multiracial characters’ pursuit of belonging begins in the space of the home and the American heartland (Chapter One), continues in the road fantasy and in the streets of coastal urban centers (Chapter Two), returns to an overseas “homeland” (Chapter Three), and finally, constructs an imagined multiracial “Promised Land” in Hawaiʻi (Chapter Four). By challenging and reimagining domestic spaces and relationships, these narratives interrogate the dominant cultural production of a cohesive national identity that alternatively excludes and domesticates racial others and instead proposes alternate modes of kinship and belonging.

In this dissertation, I analyze literature from Hawai'i, the Philippines, Guam and Samoa, in order to examine some of the individualized effects of American empire in the Pacific on identity. I choose works from these areas because they each represent a variation of legal entanglement with the United States: a former sovereign nation incorporated as a state, a colony that is now an independent nation, an unincorporated territory, and a nation split into two because of U.S. claims to half of it. I primarily utilize the lens of Asian American studies but also employ feminist and postcolonial theory in order to study some of the linkages between self and nation, subjectivity and migration, place and personhood.

I analyze the novels of Nora Okja Keller from Hawai'i to examine the entanglements between Asia, the U.S. and the Pacific in the theater of war. Jessica Hagedorn's novels afford a glimpse into the after-life of colonialism in the Philippines, the Chamoru poetry of Craig Santos Perez and Chris Perez Howard's biography of his mother demonstrate differing perspectives on the continuing American occupation of Guam, and the narratives of Sia Figiel and Albert Wendt of Samoa display some of the layered effects of multiple colonizations upon the disenfranchised of the islands.

A secondary goal of this project is to push the boundaries of Asian American studies to see if and how Pacific Islander studies can be fruitfully combined with the discipline. Although Asian American studies has primarily been focused on citizenship within the United States, Pacific Islander studies also concentrates on issues surrounding indigeneity and sovereignty struggles in locales outside of the mainland U.S. By broadening the focus of Asian American studies, it is possible to point the way for further, nuanced studies of the relationships between U.S. and non-U.S. imperialisms and the "minor transnationalisms" that surpass the binaries of cultural formation that dominate discussions of postcolonialism and nationalism.

As a cross-genre study, this project centralizes performances of physical excess, putting genre theory in conversation with Asian/American critical race discourses to articulate the specific knowledges produced by film, stand-up comedy, theatre, and sports. Considering figures such as Annabel Chong, Margaret Cho, and Manny Pacquiao from within the discourses of gender and nation, I investigate how the Asian/American body in extremis speaks and is spoken, and how Asian/American subjects use both sexuality and violence to construct subjectivity in spite of and through their determined bodies.

I introduce the concept of “conocimiento narratives” in my dissertation as a lens to understand Latina/o children’s and young adult literature and as a means to engage in conversations about healing in the lives of Latina/o children. I adapt Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa’s articulation of “conocimiento,” which she describes as the process of using knowledge for healing, in order to emphasize the different ways this literature represents the oppressions Latina/o children in the United States face and the ways those oppressions are challenged via healing processes. In the course of this dissertation, I provide analyses of realist fiction by authors such as Juan Felipe Herrera, Charles Rice-González, Rigoberto González, and Rene Colato Laínez to explore how structures of knowing and healing impact the various subject positions Latina/o children take.

Chapter 1 of the dissertation introduces conocimiento narratives by examining the creative acts of young Latina characters in order to demonstrate how traditional künstlerromane, novels of artistic development, exclude issues of race and ethnicity from its definition of artist. Texts like Luis J. Rodriguez’s América is Her Name allow me to highlight the use of art to promote healing in the lives of Latina girls. Chapter 2 investigates how absent fathers, who are “absent” due to immigration status, incarceration, and illness, inform their sons’ conocimiento process and constructions of Latino masculinity. Through Juan Felipe Herrera’s Downtown Boy, for example, I examine how Mr. Palomares’s search for water that will heal his diabetes is at odds with his son’s own conocimiento process. Chapter 3 presents conocimiento as an alternative to the oppressive forces of homonationalism in queer Latino young adult novels and moves toward a holistic queer Latino identity. By examining Charles González-Rice’s Chulito I complicate the notion that Latino youth must leave their neighborhood in order to be openly queer. Chapter 4 follows Trinidad Ramos, a Latina transgender character in Rigoberto González’s The Mariposa Club trilogy, through her senior year and examines the violence that she experiences for identifying as transgender and the ways that conocimiento serves as a means to survive.

Language of the Heart explores Korean adoptee identity, adoptive family dynamics, mythologies of blood, and the negotiations of kinship and racial difference within transnational and transracial adoption criticism and popular texts. I argue for a Korean adoptee identity that does not condemn the adoptee to victimhood and inauthentic selfhood. The transnational and transracial adoption critical canon offers little agency or futurity for the Korean adoptee—often generously designated as the “model transnational and transracial adoptee.” Language of the Heart explores why this might be and suggests that given how transracial adoptee literature is dominated by self-writing, authobiography, memoir, and poetry, for many critics, identity, then, is simply treated as the summation of the expressed self in the text. Further, given that the Korean adoptee’s expressed self is most commonly articulated as lost, inauthentic, or, as Eleana Kim notes, inescapably haunted, I argue that Korean adoptee identity actually provocatively catechizes and indexes the limitations of founding identity in blood and kinship. My dissertation proffers a theory of disorientation and disoriented identity that aims to dismantle genetic essentialism, nativism, and the heteronormative nuclear national family that are inevitable within heteronormative kinship regimes. Ultimately, this project excavates kinship, as the binary of biogenetic or “blood” relations versus adoptive or “social” relations, and the consequences of not taking seriously the grounding of identity in kinship, blood, family, history, and the nation.

This dissertation investigates the act of writing and the role of intertextuality in

adolescent subject formation as it is depicted in Young Adult narratives. Focusing on the postmodern elements in contemporary coming-of-age narratives, such as the prevalence of intertextuality, the elaboration on social constructionism, and the complexity of social relativity, I argue that moving into the Lacanian symbolic order necessitates active communication with the realm of the social, only achieved through a reliance on the textual. In my analysis, I focus primarily on texts where self-writing, reference, pastiche, parody, and bricolage simultaneously emphasize but also attempt to assuage the disorienting effects of the current, fragmented, postmodern cultural landscape.

This dissertation accounts for the contention of many developmental theorists

who posit that the processes associated with coming-of-age today are more complex than perhaps ever before as a consequence of postmodernism as a social phenomenon. Because these processes associated with coming into adulthood differ for male and female protagonists in Young Adult literature, chapter one focuses on female protagonists who grapple with and/or resist normative prescriptions of womanhood through selfwriting while chapter two analyzes intertextuality in regard to masculine shame and subject formation. Chapter three discusses the pervasive thematic of death in YA literature and the relationship between representations of death and changing notions of selfhood in regard to the body. Lastly, the fourth and final chapter focuses on posthumanism and technofuturism in coming-of-age narratives where technology, by way of social network culture and mass media, complicates notions of selfhood and points toward the necessity for redefining coming into adulthood in our current, networked culture. The texts discussed in chapter four illustrate palpable anxieties pertaining to a loss of agency as a result of being inscribed by mass media. As a result, this dissertation concludes by emphasizing that what it means to come-of-age is drastically changing in the digital age. The anxiety stemming from changing conceptualizations of the self in chapter four speaks to the necessity to reconfigure how we think about the self in our current networked culture.