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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Early Asian American Literature Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5bd17375 Author Clark, Audrey Wu Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Early Asian American Literature By Audrey Wu Clark A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Colleen Lye, Co-Chair Professor Richard Cándida Smith, Co-Chair Professor Gautam Premnath Professor Michael Omi Spring 2010 The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Early Asian American Literature © 2010 by Audrey Wu Clark 1 Abstract The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Early Asian American Literature by Audrey Wu Clark Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Colleen Lye, Co-Chair Professor Richard Cándida Smith, Co-Chair My project traces a genealogy of universalism in early Asian American literature that led to the panethnic formation of the Asian American literary canon in the 1960s and 1970s. I contribute to the recent criticisms of panethnicity as the organizing principle of the field by arguing that the panethnic paradigm, based solely on the anachronistically imposed alliance of excluded diverse Asian ethnic groups, did not structure early Asian American literature. Instead, I argue that the authors of these early texts represented the racial particularity of their “Asian American” protagonists as universal. The protagonists’ performances of universalism exposed the doubleness of American universalism—that is, the failed universalism that excluded racial minorities and the promised inclusive universalism that is yet to come. My conceptualization of Asian American universalism fortifies the theoretical aspect of the sociological paradigm of panethnicity by offering a different and more historically specific approach than the deconstructive readings of political resistance and melancholic abjection that have very recently theorized panethnicity. Since Americanism was conceived through liberal universalism during the period of Asian exclusion (1882-1943), becoming “Asian American” for these authors and their protagonists impossibly and yet productively universalized their racial particularity to their predominantly white audiences. For some critics, Asian American subjectivity is imagined through only the impossibility of Asian American universalism. By contrast, I argue that the Asian American is formed through the dialectic between racial particularity as an “alien ineligible to citizenship” and liberal universalism. The aim of the dialectic in each of the works I study is framed by the historical moment of each work’s publication: In my first two chapters on Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Sadakichi Hartmann’s and Yone Noguchi’s modernist haikus, I demonstrate that their protagonists and poetic personas attempt to claim space within the American literary imagination during the Progressive Era. In the latter two chapters, I examine the ways in which the protagonists of Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s Caste and Outcast and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West , and Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart employ modernist forms of temporal nonlinearity to transcend the capitalist commodification of linear time during the Popular Front era. Through performances of 2 American racial, gender, and class norms, all of the Asian American protagonists of my study not only reveal the exclusions and limitations of American universalism but also attempt to redeem it by articulating new sets of demands for racial, gender, and class equality. The empirical non-existence of Asian American universalism poses a baseline problem of invisibility and thus the demands of racial egalitarianism mobilized by the “not-yet” of Asian American universalism take the visible or more easily identifiable forms of modernist avant-gardism and progressive gender politics in all four of my chapters. i TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ii Toward an Asian American Modernism Acknowledgments xix CHAPTER ONE 1 Chinatown as Universal Region in Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance CHAPTER TWO 32 “Little Postage Stamps of Native Soil”: The Modernist Haiku during Japanese Exclusion CHAPTER THREE 68 Renewing America in Dhan Gopal Mukerji’s Caste and Outcast and Younghill Kang’s East Goes West CHAPTER FOUR 100 Bursting the Heart of Democracy: The Politics of Nonlinear Temporality in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart Bibliography 137 ii INTRODUCTION Toward an Asian American Modernism The Possibility of Universalism? In Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies,” the eponymous short story of her 1999 collection of transnational South Asian American stories, the Indian tour guide Mr. Kapasi becomes infatuated with a South Asian American woman named Mrs. Das who is visiting relatives in India with her husband and children. Mr. Kapasi, who also works as a physician’s language translator, channels his “drea[m] of being an interpreter for diplomats and dignitaries, resolving conflicts between people and nations, settling disputes of which he alone could understand both sides” 1 through his romantic fantasy of an overseas affair with her. Dissatisfied with his lackluster vocations and his own submissive and indifferent wife, Mr. Kapasi is enthralled by Mrs. Das’s emasculating, voluble, American beauty. Her appearance—as she wears “a close-fitting blouse styled like a man’s undershirt…[h]er hair, shorn only a little longer than her husband’s” 2— reminds him of his own emasculation, reflected in the emaciated Indian man and bullocks that Mr. Das photographs. After Mrs. Das praises Mr. Kapasi’s “romantic” work as a physician’s assistant and asks him to write down his address on a piece of paper in order to send him photograph prints of their trip, he begins his fantasy of their romantic, international exchange in which they would arrive at some sort of mutual, universal understanding of their nations: “He would explain things to her, things about India, and she would explain things to him about America. In its own way this correspondence would fulfill his dream, of serving as an interpreter between nations. He looked at her straw bag, delighted that his address lay nestled among its contents.” 3 And yet, as he becomes further acquainted with her and the “common, trivial little secret” 4 of her past marital infidelities, he is disenchanted with her and inadvertently insults her when he suggests that her malady is guilt rather than pain. The break in their intimacy is further represented at the end of the story when Mrs. Das is tending to her son Bobby’s injury and the piece of paper bearing his address slips out of her purse and flutters away in the wind: “He watched as it rose, carried higher and higher by the breeze, into the trees where the monkeys now sat, solemnly observing the scene below.” 5 The loss of Mr. Kapasi’s written address illuminates the impossible fantasy on which he had built his anticipated relationship with Mrs. Das, signifying the very impossibility of a universal “interpreter between nations.” Reflective of its post-civil rights era, poststructuralist moment, “Interpreter of Maladies” demonstrates disenchantment with American universalism—the notion that American democracy is accessible to all and internationally replicable. The overseas interactions between Mrs. Das and Mr. Kapasi illustrate Lisa Lowe’s seminal argument that “the Asian American, even as a citizen, continues to be located outside the cultural 1 Jhumpa Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies,” Interpreter of Maladies (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999) 52. 2 Lahiri, 46. 3 Lahiri, 59. 4 Lahiri, 66. 5 Lahiri, 69. iii and racial boundaries of the nation.” 6 The short story concludes with a remaining “picture of the Das family” in India—frazzled by Bobby’s injuries from an attack by the native monkeys—that “he would preserve forever in his mind.” 7 Rediscovering their cultural roots and yet finding themselves out of place in India, the Das family appears to have carved out an alternative space that, as Lowe argues, deconstructs American universalism and characterizes Asian American culture as a space of difference. 8 Lowe’s reframing of Asian American subjectivity as heterogeneous, transnational, and anti-universal initiated a spate of criticism that recast Asian American literature as transnational expressions of diaspora rather than cultural national claims of America—a framing which had initially defined the field. The transnational turn in Asian American studies thus mobilizes diasporic texts such as “Interpreter of Maladies” as “Asian American.” The celebration of American universalism in many early Asian American texts, such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), trouble Lowe’s definition. In fact, the dual critique of American democracy and championing of American universalism in America Is in the Heart , for example, served as fodder for the cultural national aim to carve out a separatist America that was alternative to the white, mainstream United States. And yet, it is clear by the conclusion of his (now canonical) semi-autobiographical novel that Bulosan is neither celebrating a cultural national America
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