3 research outputs found
American Orientalism and Cosmopolitan Mixed Race: Early Asian American Mixed Race in the American Literary Imagination
This paper offers and initial examination of representations of Asian American mixed race during the long period of Asian exclusion and enforced anti-miscegenation when racial mixing was legally proscribed. I argue that this literature must be understood through two categories Orientalist texts that produce and reproduce dominant discourses about Asian American mixed race and cosmopolitan texts written by mixed-race figures circling in vanguard cliques of art and literature. After tracking the representations of early Asian American mixed race in U.S. literature, this paper offers an analysis of the writing of Asian American mixed-race authors themselves in order to expand and push current theorizations
Hybrid Veggies & Mixed Kids: Ecocriticism and Race in Ruth Ozeki\u27s Pastoral Heartlands
This paper explores the troping of racial categories and mixed race bodies in Ruth Ozekis All Over Creation (2003) and My Year of Meats (1999). Moving through both transnational and local space, Ozekis writes an ecocritical pastoral text in order to resist representations of people of mixed race stemming from nineteenth century racial theory. Drawing attention to the consumption of food within and across national borders, whether genetically modified potatoes or hormone-infused beef, Ozeki simultaneously highlights the uncritical consumption of the language of biology around the mixed race body. All Over Creation and My Year of Meats are constructed around the traditions and tensions inherent in the pastoral, using mixed race to counter the silences of ecocritical discourse while problematizing science- and place-based constructions of race
Figuring Futures: Early Asian American Mixed-Race Literature
This dissertation examines figurations of Asian mixed race during the long period of Asian exclusion and enforced anti-miscegenation in the United States, when racial mixing was legally proscribed. During this time of U.S. expansion into Asia, and of unprecedented Asian immigration into the United States, such proscription helped maintain normative white identity while rendering the Asian American mixed-race body illegible, making cultural production one of the few sites where Asian American mixed race could be imagined. There, a defining feature of these figures was their consistent use in projecting potential U.S. futures; Asian mixed-race figures were used to work through the relationship of Asia and the United States, and of Asians in the United States, during these times of conflict with and phobia of Asia. Because this period’s tensions emerge from the confrontation between “white” and “Asian,” Asian mixed-race literary figures embodied through their mixed heritage the ideological and material threat Asia posed for the United States and the promise of a different future.Tracing these early figurations of Asian American mixed race, this dissertation is arranged in two sections. Part One addresses representations of Asian American mixed race through American Orientalist ideology, where Asian mixed-race figures were used to support and naturalize U.S. imperialism abroad. Part Two explores the writings and reflections of Asian mixed-race authors and artists who sought to reimagine Asian mixed race through visions of world community that resisted imperialism and racism. By spanning the long period of Asian exclusion, this dissertation thus begins to uncover established and emergent figurations of Asian mixed race in the United States. In doing so, my dissertation uncovers the genealogy of the current proliferation of mixed-race figures in contemporary cultural production, where mixed race is synonymous with a future post-racial United States, one that all too frequently aligns with U.S. imperialism. By exposing the instrumentalization of the early Asian American mixed-race subject, my project traces the uncomfortable residue of race at the heart of post-racial discourse, promoting caution around the simplified acceptance of mixed race as somehow beyond or between race, while simultaneously uncovering alternate, anti-racist trajectories