UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Radical

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Radical Relationality: Genre and Affect in Asian American Historical Fiction of the Long Sixties A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Kai Hang Cheang December 2018 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Stephen Hong Sohn, Co-Chairperson Dr. Weihsin Gui, Co-Chairperson Dr. David Lloyd Dr. Traise Yamamoto Copyright by Kai Hang Cheang 2018 The Dissertation of Kai Hang Cheang is approved: Committee Co-Chairperson Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements I thank all of my friends, family members, and mentors near and afar who have made me feel at home when home is an ocean away. In particular, I want to thank Gustav Meuschke, Jaymee Goh, Xiomara Forbez, Sarah Buckner, Aran Park, Heejoo Park, Joshua Pearson and Stina Attebery for their friendship in graduate school, which—as I am reminded over and again—is hard to find. I also thank my partner Andrew Harnish for his trust in my work, his unwavering support of my scholarly advancement, and his attentiveness to my thinking and writing. I thank Prof. Weihsin Gui, one of my co-chairs, for taking me and my scholarship seriously before I learned how to, and for shepherding me so wisely along the path toward the completion of this project. I likewise thank Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn, my other co-chair, for his tireless vision and guidance throughout my process of writing. I am also indebted to him for pointing me to book review and fellowship opportunities. Gratitude is also due to my dissertation committee members Professor Traise Yamamoto, whose feedback greatly improved my writing, and Professor David Lloyd, who modeled what great scholarship and mentorship should look like. This dissertation, at is core, is about a group of people from different backgrounds and places of origin coming together to achieve collective flourishing. I would not have such an idea if I had not experienced it growing up with Kenneth Ho, Jenson Chan, Trevor Ho, Richard Lai, Henry Cheong, Jason Tam, Piter Chiu, and Keon Lao who played volleyball and sang in church choir with me at Yuet Wah College. Thank you all for making growing up bearable. iv I am also eternally grateful for my parents, Su Lan Leong and Chan Wah Cheang, for their patience and love; also, thanks to Grandma Leong and Grandma Cheang, who first showed me the grit of immigrants. Chapters in this dissertation have benefited from workshopping in seminars. I wrote Chapter 4 when I was a part of the Mellon Advancing Intercultural Studies seminar titled “Economic Inequality.” The coda has been heavily influenced by my participation in the Sawyer Mellon Seminar on “Alternative Futurity.” Chapter 2 was improved by the enthusiastic feedback from the audience for the public lecture I delivered after my receiving the Barricelli Memorial Grant. v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Radical Relationality: Genre and Affect in Asian American Historical Fiction of the Long Sixties by Kai Hang Cheang Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, December 2018 Dr. Stephen Hong Sohn, Co-Chairperson Dr. Weihsin Gui, Co-Chairperson This dissertation argues that Asian American historical fiction of the Long Sixties does not merely depict the living and lived realities of immigrant lives, but also performs the social transformation sought by the activist groups that first articulated Asian American identity. Drawing on the founding documents of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) at UC Berkeley, the first group to advance the collective identity category of “Asian American” and to define Asian America as a flexible “sliding structure,” my dissertation shows that the “sliding structure” is, and always has been, the means by which radicalism is expressed in Asian American literature. My analysis builds upon new formalism to demonstrate that “sliding” between narrative tropes and affective registers allows Asian American historical novelists of the Long Sixties to capture and critique the array of global conditions and national cultures that gave rise to Asian America. vi Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………1-29 Chapter One Family Discord/ance: Tone and Counter-Mood in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land…….…………..30-64 Chapter Two Freedom Riders: Vehicular Mobility and Community Mobilization in Japanese American Women’s Road Narratives of a Post-Interment Moment………..……………………………...……65-117 Chapter Three Forms of Conviction: Asian American Noir Fictions and the Law……………………..…………...……118-167 Chapter Four Remediating Asian America: The Representational Logic of Capitalism and the Camera in Documentary Fictions by Sam Tagatac and Karen Tei Yamashita………….………………………...……...168-228 Coda…………………………………..……………………………………...…….229-237 Works Cited…………………………………..……………………………...…….238-245 Appendix…………………………………..………………………………...…….246-251 vii Introduction What evolves is a concept of this “sliding structure”; getting to as many people as possible. “An Understanding of AAPA August 24,” 1968 The term I would suggest to describe it is structure of feeling: it is as firm and definite as “structure” suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible part of our activity (48). Raymond Williams’s Long Revolution, 1961 Kandice Chuh first publicized the term radical relationality in her keynote speech delivered at the 2017 American Studies Association. In that speech, she described a pedagogy of dissent as a point of departure for teacher-activists to invent radical ways of “being-with” other racial, gendered, and sexual minorities on campus to make lasting change by decentering the white supremacy the American university was founded upon. This system, as Chuh points out, was constructed “under the sign of Western Man while subjugating all others as not-yet and perhaps never to be capable of its possession” (158). As a decolonial praxis (developed out of the concept of “being-with” from the late José Esteban Muñoz) Chuh’s radical relationality is the guiding principle for teacher-activists when they break off from their institutions’ stratification to organize alliances of resistance with other minoritized subjects. Radical relationality is also their desired outcome. My dissertation extends Chuh’s concept from its original context within critical university studies into the new formalist analysis of literary studies to theorize Asian 1 American radicalism as it exists within historical fiction. Radical Relationality: Genre and Affect in Asian American Historical Fiction of the Long Sixties is a performative project; its methodology and reading practice seek to enact Chuh’s notion of “being- with.” My project performs radical relationality by bringing together genre and affect theories, two fields that have seldom been considered in conjunction in Asian American Studies, in order to excavate the radical relations in Asian America since its foundation in the Long Sixties as expressed across space and time.1 As I locate Asian American radicalism’s impact on the American cultural imaginary in the narrative and meta- narrative levels of literary texts, I hope to show the transitivity of the Asian American Movement within and beyond the page, from its beginnings as an activist campaign on campus, to the lives it takes on in fiction as it is passed on from one generation to the next, moving from one medium to another. Following critics of literary realism beginning with György Lukács, Gail Day, and Yoon Sun Lee, I understand transitivity in aesthetic and social terms. Building on Lukács, Day (2011) defines transitivity in opposition to “still life” (216), representations which reify the politically repressive, decadent tradition of the bourgeoisie. For Day, transitivity, includes the “activities and struggles of human relations” (210); 1 For projects that put affect and cultural form into meaningful conversation, see Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, especially its first chapter on flat emotion and flat tone in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade and Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City on patriotism and the genre of pilgrimage narrative. For those within Asian American studies, see Karen Shimakawa’s treatment of abjection and theatrical performance in National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage and Patricia P. Chu’s discussion of feelings and bildungsromans in Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. 2 representations of these relations are accordingly dynamic: they seek to contest dominant expressions and replace them with authentically realist art that acknowledges the “unattainability” of Lukács’s totality (211) and delineates aspects of the Real by “connect[ing] the partial, particular, and fragmentary phenomenon” (Lee 471) of history during (rare) moments of political transformation. Another way of putting this is that the subject matter of Lukácsian realism is the elaboration of history during its moments of change. The representation of an unfolding historical process is difficult, to say the least; in novels, for example, the spirit of an era is usually condensed into a thing, such as a character. That character then becomes the subject and object of his/her time: object because he/she is the product of the period, subject when he/she attempts to change it. Historical novels that portray the tension between their protagonist and that figure’s historical predicaments are therefore doing something

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