“Onto the hard path toward freedom”: Urban Environments and Asian American Agency

This paper explores the relationship between three fictional Asian American protagonists and their urban experience in three novels from the postwar period: John Okada’s "No-No Boy" (1957), Hua Chuang’s "Crossings" (1968), and Nami Mun’s "Miles from Nowhere" (2009). The settings of the three novels are very dissimilar, but they are closely linked in thematic terms by the protagonists’ displacement in the various urban locations in which they find themselves. In his Beyond Literary Chinatown, Jeffrey F. L. Partridge regards the textual worlds under study as a potent mediums of cultural transformation, but claims that at their best they begin to push us “onto the hard path toward freedom.” Taking my cue from this notion, I examine to what extent the three protagonists’ construction of transformative identity is related to their experience of their urban environment, paying attention to the novels’ complicity with and challenges to hierarchies of race, gender and class

Challenging the Color-Blind American Dream: Transnational Adoption in A Gesture Life, The Love Wife, and Digging to America

In historical terms the culture-specific notion of “the American Dream” has excluded racialized groups of people. However, the rise of postethnic and color-blind thinking in the past few decades implies that ethnic and racial equality has already been realized in the United States where people are free to choose their ethnic identities. Adoption as a literary trope is regarded as important because it allows authors to speak of broader questions about identity and belonging. This study focuses on transnational and transracial adoption in three novels: Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999), Gish Jen’s The Love Wife (2004), and Ann Tyler’s Digging to America (2006). These novels link adoption to the realization of one of the updated versions of the American Dream. I call it the Color-Blind American Dream, because it is pursued through denial of racial difference. As the adopting families in the three novels differ from one another, I examine the depth of their faithfulness to notions of race transcendence—and if the novels in question ultimately challenge the Color-Blind American Dream. In a white-dominated society, Asian immigrants and adoptees of Asian descent are socialized to identify with idealized whiteness, but experiences of racism inescapably draw attention to their visible difference. At the turn of the 21st century, there was a shift in Asian American studies to transnationalism and diasporic identity constructions as well as psychoanalytic criticism. In my essay, I apply the psychoanalytic concepts of “racial melancholia” and “racial reparation,” which have been developed by Asian American scholars. Since the three novels, which all tackle transnational and transracial adoption, invest in the Color Blind- American Dream, these theoretical concepts are helpful in questioning what is being repressed in adhering to a postethnic and color-blind refusal to engage history and how this affects identity and sense of national belonging

The Vietnam War, the Whale Hunt and the Wall in Linda Hogan's People of the Whale.

Native Americans participated in the Vietnam War in a disproportionally large number in relation to their actual population in the United States. Nevertheless, few American Indian novelists have dealt with the war and its legacy. This article explores the significance of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Pacific Northwest Coast to the protagonist’s war trauma in Linda Hogan’s novel People of the Whale (2008). Drawing upon Michelle Balaev’s pluralistic model of literary trauma theory, my reading of the novel investigates the importance of place and contextual factors vis-à-vis the protagonist’s process of remembrance of the traumatic event. It also looks at the narrative strategies employed in the novel and uses ecological approaches when exploring the meaning of the two sites. Ultimately, the novel not only raises serious moral and political issues concerning the Vietnam War, but it also shows that the places of healing are symbolically linked to one another</p