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Rhetorical Readings of Asian American Literacy Narratives

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Rhetorical Readings of Asian American Literacy Narratives ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: ARTICULATING IDENTITIES: RHETORICAL READINGS OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERACY NARRATIVES Linnea Marie Hasegawa, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004 Dissertation directed by: Professor Kandice Chuh Department of English This dissertation examines how Asian American writers, through what I call critical acts of literacy, discursively (re)construct the self and make claims for alternative spaces in which to articulate their identities as legitimate national subjects. I argue that using literacy as an analytic for studying certain Asian American texts directs attention to the rhetorical features of those texts thereby illuminating how authors challenge hegemonic ideologies about literacy and national identity. Analyzing the audiences and situations of these texts enriches our understanding of Asian American identity formation and the social, cultural, and political functions that these literacy narratives serve for both the authors and readers of the texts. The introduction lays the groundwork for my dissertation’s arguments and method of analysis through a reading of Theresa Cha’s Dictée. By situating readers in such a way that they are compelled to consider their own engagements with literacy and how discourses of literacy and citizenship function to reproduce dominant ideologies, Dictée advances a theoretical model for reading literacy narratives. In subsequent chapters I show how this methodology encourages a kind of reading practice that may serve to transform readers’ ideologies. Part I argues that reading the fictional autobiographies of Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan as literacy narratives illuminates the ways in which they simultaneously critique the contradiction between the myth of American democratic inclusion and the reality of exclusion while claiming Americanness through a demonstration of their own and their fictional alter egos’ literacies. Part II argues for the hyperliteracy of Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker. I posit that the narrator-protagonists’ acts of hyperliteracy are performances of identity that mark and contest their indeterminacy as minority subjects. Finally, the conclusion investigates the debates surrounding Hawai`i author Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging and the use of Pidgin as a resistant discourse in the text. I argue that examining literacy in the context of U.S. imperialism points to both the increasing need for and difficulty of using literacy as a theorizing framework for the study of Asian American literatures. ARTICULATING IDENTITIES: RHETORICAL READINGS OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERACY NARRATIVES by Linnea Marie Hasegawa Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2004 Advisory Committee: Professor Kandice Chuh, Chair Professor Jeanne Fahnestock Professor Shirley Logan Professor Sangeeta Ray Professor Marylu McEwen © Copyright by Linnea Marie Hasegawa 2004 For Mom and Dad, with love ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are a number of people I would like to thank for their guidance and support as I worked to complete this dissertation. I am indebted to my director and advisor Kandice Chuh for her thorough readings and insightful commentary on multiple drafts, for always challenging me to think more critically, and for her mentorship and support for the past eight years. Professors Jeanne Fahnestock and Shirley Logan also read and commented upon chapter drafts, for which I am grateful. Collectively, their constructive feedback helped me to shape and sharpen my analysis into a more cohesive argument. I thank Professor Sangeeta Ray for her support throughout the years that I have been a graduate student at the University of Maryland. Professor Marylu McEwen I thank for serving as the Dean’s Representative on my dissertation committee. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Morris Young, who assisted me in thinking through some ideas at the earliest stages of my writing, and whose insightful and thoughtful work on Asian American literacy narratives served as an inspiration for this dissertation. Tracy Chung and Meryl Sirmans, my dear friends and colleagues at the University of Maryland whom I have known since college, have provided invaluable intellectual and moral support as I worked towards completing this degree. I thank Meryl for being a compassionate listener, for her sound advice, and for commiserating with me as we both struggled to reach our goals. I am forever indebted to Tracy for her time, keen eye for detail, insightful feedback on chapter drafts, and helping to keep my spirits up when things seemed to be falling apart. I cannot express enough my appreciation for her continuous support and sense of humor. I also thank my friends and colleagues Crystal iii Parikh and Min Kim, who earlier graduated from the program at Maryland, for reviewing portions of my dissertation. Scattered across the globe are my friends from the American School in Japan— Clara Barnett, Karen Cotter, Joy Fuyuno, Susan Coleman Olesek, Betsy Olson, Ayako Seki, and Jennifer Speri—who listened to my rants and raves throughout my years in graduate school, but more importantly have given me the gift of their friendship for so many years. My husband’s parents, Annie and Win Aung, along with my sister-in-law Maybelle and her husband Harry, have graciously welcomed me into their lives and have enthusiastically cheered me on as I took each step toward completing my degree. I am thankful for their encouragement, love and support. For reminding me how to play and for making me laugh, I thank Caroline and Matthew Jordan. My dear husband Rob listened and responded to the excitement and fear that I expressed about this undertaking with patience, thoughtfulness, and wisdom, for which I am deeply grateful. I am thankful for his meticulous proofreading skills, his assumption of day-to-day household tasks, his faith that I would indeed someday finish, and above all his partnership, love and support. My parents, Pam and Souk Hasegawa—to whom this work is dedicated—and my brother, Sergei, have sustained me in so many ways and never doubted my commitment or my ability to overcome the challenges I have faced. The inspiration for my dissertation topic emerged from my experience growing up in a bi-racial and bi-cultural family. My parents exposed me to diverse cultures throughout my childhood and adolescence, and taught me to respect and appreciate difference through their marriage iv and in innumerable other ways. For my family’s unbounded love, support, and confidence in me, I am and will always be grateful. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Reconfiguring Literacy and Subjectivity………………………………...1 Part I: Narratives of Literacy and Immigration Chapter 1: Younghill Kang’s East Goes West .…………………………………….57 Chapter 2: Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart ……………………………..93 Part II: Hyperliteracy, Hybridity and Disguise Chapter 3: Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman …………………………...127 Chapter 4: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker……………………………………... 162 Conclusion: Reconstructing Ideologies……………………………………………. 192 Notes …….....…………………………………………………………………………226 Works Cited…...………………………………………………………………………239 vi Introduction: Reconfiguring Literacy and Subjectivity In the sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision. How to choose persimmons. This is precision. Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted. Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one will be fragrant. How to eat: put the knife away, lay down the newspaper. Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat. Chew on the skin, suck it, and swallow. Now, eat the meat of the fruit, so sweet all of it, to the heart … Other words that got me into trouble were fight and fright, wren and yarn. Fight was what I did when I was frightened, fright was what I felt when I was fighting. Wrens are small, plain birds, yarn is what one knits with. Wrens are soft as yarn. My mother made birds out of yarn. I loved to watch her tie the stuff; a bird, a rabbit, a wee man. Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple. Knowing it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat but watched the other faces … —Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons” 1 I begin my discussion with Lee’s poem because it resonates with the issues and queries with which this dissertation is principally engaged. Though the poem explicitly addresses issues relating to language, culture, and race, it also problematizes the relationships among these constructs as the teacher both asserts her authority as the arbiter of cultural citizenship and publicly installs the speaking subject as foreign. The speaker and the “Chinese apple,” which Mrs. Walker brings in for her students to taste (possibly for the first time), are juxtaposed in such a way as to suggest that both are foreign and distasteful. The speaker tells us, “Knowing / it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat / but watched the other faces.” The significance of the speaker refusing to participate lies in his refusal to conform to the narrative that has already placed him outside of the nation. By creating a speaker who challenges his teacher’s and, by extension, dominant culture’s systematic hierarchization of students based on their pronunciation and the value that American culture places on speaking English without an accent, Lee argues for his speaker’s legitimacy as a participant in cultural criticism and illustrates the inadequacy of hegemonic standards of evaluation.1 Mrs. Walker suggests that knowing the difference between the denotations of the two words is not as important as being able to recognize (and enunciate) the subtle nuances in how each word is pronounced. Lee then critiques this ideology by constructing Mrs. Walker as the one who displays a shallow understanding of the two words. I use the excerpt from Lee’s poem as a point of departure for the following analysis because it so poignantly illustrates the problematics I aim to address.
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