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©2009 Rika Nakamura ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©2009 Rika Nakamura ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ATTENDING THE LANGUAGES OF THE OTHER: RECUPERATING “ASIA,” ABJECT, OTHER IN ASIAN NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE by RIKA NAKAMURA A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program of Literatures in English Written under the direction of Abena P. A. Busia And approved by __________________________ __________________________ __________________________ __________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey January, 2009 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Attending the Languages of the Other: Recuperating “Asia,” Abject, Other in Asian North American Literature by RIKA NAKAMURA Dissertation Director: Abena P. A Busia This dissertation engages in an examination of three Asian North American authors‟ acts of reclaiming “Asia.” I discuss the attempts made by Mitsuye Yamada, Joy Kogawa, and Nora Okja Keller to recuperate their ancestral land as a force that intervenes in their normative North American perceptions, discursive practices, and subject constructions. Despite the current popularities in the Asian North Americanists‟ transnationalist, diasporic, and/or internationalist reclaimings of “Asia,” what has been rarely explored is the ways in which “Asia” emerges in these authors‟ narratives as the Other that intervenes, disrupts, and problematizes their North American part of perceptions and experiences. It is this exploration I undertake. My dissertation also investigates how my authors negotiate their need to seek recognitions from their dominant nations and to simultaneously disrupt the traditional and hegemonic narratives by which they procure those recognitions. In particular, I will look at the ways in which my authors reconstruct the memories of World War II: the North ii American internment, the atomic bombing in Japan, Japanese colonialism and sexual enslavement of Korean women as well as the difficulties of narrativizing those memories within the North American context. Through these acts, my authors try to delineate, explore, and redress their present state of racial-ethnic experience and to seek the forms of political subjectivities in North America. I submit that this process of negotiation, the simultaneous claiming and disclaiming each author engages, is closely connected with their endeavor to envision “Asia.” All three authors try to read, configure, and make sense of this signifier of Otherness and to attend the (non)languages of the Other which they initially dismissed as silence and/or noises. The dissertation explores how my three authors perceive, in their different ways, their Asian Other‟s linguistic articulations as what makes them interrogate their normative North American perceptions and discursive practices. Consequently, I argue that the “two languages” the authors try to access enables them to destabilize their singular perspective and vision, allowing them to interrogate their own monolingualist normality. Finally, I investigate some instances in which this act of attending can also risk becoming an act of owning and possessing. iii Acknowledgements I would like to express my deep and sincere gratitude to the persons who helped me with the completion of this project. First and foremost, this dissertation would not have been possible without the guidance, intellectual and other, of my director Professor Abena P.A. Busia. I am truly grateful to her amazing patience, grace, and intelligence as she helped me navigate through this long journey. My gratitude also to the other members of my committee: Professor Shuang Shen for her incisive comments and helpful suggestions as well as for her pioneering work in postcolonially based Asian American literary studies, which I looked to as a model. From the early days of my graduate school at Rutgers, Professor Kurt Spellmeyer inspired me and helped me think about the meanings of “literacies,” which had a special and peculiar significance for me as an ESL doctoral candidate and TA in the discipline of English. This dissertation owes one of its central theses to his teaching. As a specialist in Asian literature, Professor Paul Schalow has given me invaluable pieces of advice from his Asianist perspective and his years of commitment and deep engagement with East Asia. I am indebted to the Asian Americanists whom I met at various conferences in Asia and in North America—AAAS and ASA in the United States, FSEL in South Korea, and JAAS in Japan—, particularly those who engage in the analyses of Asian North American literature from the perspectives of “Asia.” Thanks also to the members and friends of AALA Japan, the Asian American Literature Study group. The intellectual exchange I was privileged enough to have with these people has been crucial in the formulation of my work and bringing this project to fruition. Among them, I owe Gayle Fujita Sato for the iv title of my dissertation, which makes an allusion to her work “„To Attend the Sound of Stone‟: The Sensibility of Silence in Obasan,” a piece which shifted the direction of Kogawa criticism in its incipient moment. And ultimately, I would like to thank my authors, Mitsuye Yamada, Joy Kogawa, and Nora Okja Keller for composing their wonderfully complex and beautiful works. My heartfelt thanks, finally, to my family, especially my sister Michiyo, and my friends and colleagues including those at Seijo University for their unfailing support and encouragement when I was losing faith. v Table of Contents Abstract ….. ii Acknowledgements ….. iv Introduction: Asian American Literature in an International Frame ….. 1 Chap. 1: “Unbecoming American”: Reconfiguring the Contradictory Subjects and the Intervention of the Other/ “Japan” in Mitsuye Yamada‟s Writings ….. 33 I. Disowning “Asia”: An Early Politics and Poetics of Dispossession ….. 38 II. Deconstructing the Binaries, Gesturing toward “Translatabilities” ….. 52 III. Decolonizing the Desert/ “Immigrants”/ “Asia”: Reconfiguring the Contradictory Subjects ….. 60 Chap. 2: Attending the Languages of the Other: Recuperating the Abject/ “Asia” in Joy Kogawa‟s Obasan ….. 79 I. Questioning the Two Dichotomies ….. 79 II. Attending the Languages of “Asia”/ Other ….. 89 III. Recuperating the Abject/ Other/ “Asia”: Reconfigurations of Japanese Canadian Redress and “Citizenship” ….. 118 Chap. 3: Reclaiming the Suffering of Her Ancestral Land: Attendance and Possession in Nora Okja Keller‟s Comfort Woman ….. 148 I. The Mother‟s Stories: Narrating the Two Empires, Re-narrating “Rescue/ Escape Narratives” ….. 153 II. Performing the Medium: The Daughter‟s Narrative of Attending/ Translating/ Possessing the Languages of the (M)Other ….. 161 Conclusion: “Almost Words”: Re-narrating “Asia” in Asian North American Literature ….. 196 Bibliography ….. 230 C.V. ….. 249 vi 1 Introduction: Asian American Literature in an International Frame Reclaiming “Asia” in Asian North American Literature1 In her Introduction to Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature (2005), Zhou Xiaojing refers to the “significant shift” in focus in Asian American studies that occurred during the late 1980s, a shift “away from the agendas and strategies of cultural nationalism and toward transnational perspective and diasporic positioning” (3). Concomitant with this “paradigm shift,” though perhaps less frequently acknowledged, is the change in the Asian North Americanists‟ perceptions and constructions of their ancestral land in their writings. While “Asia” has traditionally signified the site of alterity, Otherness, or at least of ambivalence for Asian North American subjects, North Americans of Asian ancestries often confronted the need to disown this geo-political location as well as its heritages in their claims of inclusions in the national space as “legitimate” citizen-subjects. John Okada‟s novel No-No Boy (1957), one of the founding texts of Asian American literature, for instance, can be seen as being paradigmatic of this model. With the rise of multiculturalism and more recently transnationalism, however, “Asia” became an object to be reclaimed, recuperated, and reconnected within the Asian North American subjects‟ constitution of their subjectivities. As Elaine Kim puts it in her much cited phrase from her preface to the anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead (1993): “The lines between Asian and Asian American, so crucial to identity formations in the past, are increasingly blurred” (xiii). While this act of reclaiming is often viewed in a celebratory mode, what is less frequently addressed is the question regarding the North American ethnic minority 2 subjects‟ racial and imperial positioning vis-à-vis their non-Western, once dispossessed and abject ancestral land. Or to rephrase my question, given the histories of American Orientalism and its accompanying imperialist constructions of “Asia,” how do Asian North Americans as U.S. minority and imperial subjects participate in the representation and recuperation of this Other while challenging and disrupting the discursive model they inherit? To the extent they inhabit a discursive position which constructs them as Western subjects perceiving the rest of the world, how do Asian North Americans represent “Asia” which to them oftentimes constitutes a strange land, one which many of them are not necessarily familiar with? In what forms can the acts of recuperating the Other and constructing a dialogue with the previously dispossessed ancestral land take place? If the current
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