TRANSFORMATIVE RACIAL MELANCHOLIA: DEPATHOLOGISING IDENTITY IN ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S CONTEMPORARY NOVELS HANNAH HO MING YIT PHD THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE DECEMBER 2011 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the relatively new literary field of Asian American literature, and highlights the theme of identity in relation to the recent theories regarding racial melancholia. It takes Freudian psychoanalysis as its starting premise to argue for ‘transformative racial melancholia’ in hybridised Asian American subjects for whom a condition of loss is experienced in the combined processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialisation. I examine several novels by contemporary Asian American women and argue that these texts explore both racial and gender melancholia as conditions of loss. However, I suggest, these novels also demonstrate the process of depathologising melancholia within Asian American subjects and the restoration of a healthy psyche. A positive sense of identity within melancholic conditions is elicited when a healthy psyche is established. My thesis interrogates the way a constructive sense of identity is made available through avenues of intersubjective connectivity and social relations provided by the tropes of memory, history, gender performativity, and political agency. In examining and identifying these intergenerational links, I make a case for the subversion of the early concept of melancholia as individual pathology suffered by the solipsistic victim. My argument emphasises the way livability is generated in sharing, writing, and voicing melancholic losses within a larger collective communality. To this end, communication and language feature as key tools though which to convert losses into gains. To surmise, my thesis puts forward my argument regarding transformation within social interconnectivity that aids in making melancholia productive through the intersubjective management of losses. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv DECLARATION v DEDICATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Voices of Memory and Hybridised Identities in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior and Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter. 33 CHAPTER 2 History, Loss, and Homecoming in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan 86 CHAPTER 3 Performative Agency: Challenging Oriental Hyperfemininity and Melancholic Illness in Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and Fay Myenne Ng’s Bone 141 CHAPTER 4 Political Agency, Transgenerational Transformation, ‘Inside Outsiders’ and Linguistic Signification in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student, American Woman and A Person of Interest 186 CONCLUSION 254 APPENDIX 262 BIBLIOGRAPHY 263 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis would not have been possible without the generous help, kind assistance, and great dedication of a number of people. I would like to thank my wonderful supervisor, Dr Jane Elliott, for her great positivity, unstinting support, and abundant encouragement throughout the entire journey of my PhD studies at the University of York. I am grateful for her prompt responses to my correspondences, valuable feedback of my countless drafts, and her tireless efforts at supervising this project. Her kind presence at my conference presentations and generosity with her time are highly valued. I would also like to extend thanks to my close friend Kathleen for providing me with a lovely home in York. In addition, I would like to extend my gratitude to the ever helpful and resourceful librarians at the University of York. Thanks also to the administrators at the Berrick Saul for providing me with a ‘nest’, and a vibrant postgraduate study environment on campus. A big thank you has to go to all my wonderful friends who I have met along the way. These friendships remain enduring, and I continue to value each and every one of them greatly. Last but not least, I thank my dearest family for their love, support, and abundant provisions. A great many thanks to God for all His blessings showered upon me and His great faithfulness. iv DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis entitled ‘Transfromative Racial Melancholia: Depathologising Identity in Asian American Women’s Contemporary Novels’ submitted to the University of York, UK is a record of an original research work done by me under the supervision of Dr Jane Elliott, Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Wherever contributions of others are involved, every effort is made to indicate this clearly, with due reference to the literature, and acknowledgement of collaborative research and discussions. This work has not performed the basis for the award of any Degree or diploma/ associateship/fellowship and similar project if any. No part of this thesis has been submitted for publication in advance of submission of the thesis for examination. Signed: ___________________ Date: _____________________ v DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my beloved mother, Ann Tan Siew Cheng, who is and continues to be the dearest, strongest, and most vital presence in my life. Her unflagging support, diligent encouragement, and unrelenting belief in me have been most crucial to the completion of this thesis. As a pillar of strength, she is the person who I hold dearest to my heart. For this and more, I dedicate this piece of achievement –its successful completion which you envisioned even before I did– to you dearest Mummy. vi INTRODUCTION Identity Matters: Asian Americans and Loss Identity matters are at the forefront of my argument regarding Asian American transformation of racial melancholia in literary novels. As this literary project puts forward, positive Asian American identity is asserted through the collective affirmation of multiple subjectivities via performative agency that engenders transformative energies and makes losses in identity productive. By interrogating the ways in which literature delineates the positive affirmation of identity, I address matters of loss and melancholic depression in novels that inform readers about the psychic internalisation of loss that is managed via intergenerational modes. Current scholarship on Asian American literary novels points to how suffering is inherent within the psychic incorporation of melancholic loss. This internalisation of loss posits loss as permanent damage, and signals a pathological reaction to prescribed ascriptions of Asian Americans as, on the one hand, ‘yellow perils’ and, on the other hand, ‘model minority’. The racial inferiority experienced by characters in Asian American novels is said to demonstrate the overwhelming extent to which racial melancholia contributes to a sense of pathological identity. In contrast, I argue that Asian American novels offer ways in which racial melancholia is a productive everyday condition to be managed for the formation of positive identity. 1 As illustrated in novels, the racialisation of Asian American subjects due to their racialised subjectivity is made complex by gender ascriptions attached to their Asian identity. Asian Orientalist identity is typically regarded as feminine compared to the Western Occident which is cast as male superior. Such ready associations arise from a history of United States power relations dictating the colonial and military might of first world nations. As these novels demonstrate, Western America personifies white authority contrasted to Asian regions which are read as non-white and subordinate. As exemplified by characters within the novels, Asian immigrants to America are consigned to the external social periphery given that they are branded as feminine and weak. Even as they are cast as ‘yellow perils’, Asian immigrants within America are simultaneously treated as a ‘model minority’ that other minority races such as Africans and Hispanic should imitate. In both these stereotypical tropings of Asian American subjects, their minority status is highlighted. I study the way Asian American novels evidence and trace the development of Asian American identity via positive identification within their racial and ethnic status in white America. As literary representations in novels illustrate, Asian American identity and the concept of loss are frequently allied given that novels speak of the diasporic background, racialisation, and abject treatment of Asians in America. Both lost identity and losses in identity, therefore, permeate the literary works by and about America’s Asian diaspora. Displacement from their ancestral homeland, internment, and pressures for cultural assimilation are some of the factors influencing the way racial identity becomes a source of melancholic loss. Not just subject to skin discrimination, America’s Asian immigrants also experience a sense of loss in their cultural heritage, classed ethnicity, and inherited identity that testify to losses in 2 language, property, social status and geographical homeland. As these novels show, the splitting of families and physical displacement of Asians when entering white America convey a sense of loss. The social exclusion of racialised others signals the ready loss conferred upon those who do not match up against America’s white standards. Conversely, I argue that Asian American novels present significant ways in which identity losses are managed in the identification process within intergenerational relations and across ethnic Asian groups. In this way, social identification with generations of family and other Asian peoples plays an important role in affirming positive