Genre, Gender and Geopolitics in Contemporary American
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Autobiography is a wound where the blood of history does not dry. —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ("Acting Bits/Identity Talk," 172) TRANS/NATIONAL SUBJECTS: GENRE, GENDER, AND GEOPOLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Theresa A. Kulbaga, M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 2006 Dissertation Committee: Approved By Professor Wendy S. Hesford, Adviser ___________________________________ Professor Julia Watson Adviser English Graduate Program Professor Debra Moddelmog Copyright by Theresa A. Kulbaga 2006 ABSTRACT My dissertation project is situated at the intersection of 20th-century American literary and cultural studies, particularly contemporary formulations that urge a comparativist, hemispheric, or transnational approach to American literatures and cultures. Taking up this critical conversation through a study of genre, namely autobiography, I argue for a comparative and transnational approach to ethnic women's life narratives. Scholars of autobiography have examined how the genre, in its construction of the autobiographical subject as model citizen, participates in the project of U.S. citizenship and nation-building. What is less recognized is how ethnic and immigrant women autobiographers have pushed the borders of the genre and, by extension, have challenged the fantasy of the representative citizen-subject in the U.S. I argue that a number of contemporary autobiographers are rewriting the genre in order to represent the transnational subject—that is, the subject who does not identify with a single nation-state or whose national identity is inseparable from global social and economic contexts. These writers, I argue, use genre as a rhetorical strategy in order to redefine identity, citizenship, and rights through a global or transnational lens. The recent "memoir boom" provides a unique opportunity to examine how ethnic women authors take up or take on national claims, rights claims, and identity claims in various self-representational acts. Because autobiography is characterized by a rhetorical ii promise to portray truthfully the unique yet representative person, writers in the U.S. have long used the genre to make strategic arguments about national belonging and political rights and obligations. My project examines how ethnic women autobiographers position themselves in this tradition even as they transform the genre to acknowledge multiple and flexible citizenships constructed in the context of global capitalism. The life narratives I examine foreground the production, circulation, and reception of gendered identities and narratives across cultural and national borders. However, far from simply deconstructing national borders and identity claims entirely, ethnic women autobiographers continue to mobilize, even to reconstruct, both—strategically arguing for expanded definitions of nation and citizen. I argue that ethnic women autobiographers' generic experiments in self-representation must be read not as a mode of postmodernist "play" but as cultural responses to uneven material histories and development. This is particularly the case for autobiographers for whom the U.S. is not the sole space of national identification, namely immigrant and ethnic authors, and for autobiographers whose gendered relationship to citizenship and national rights and protections is problematic, namely women. For these authors, "border crossing" names a contemporary process fraught with risks and burdens that, when inscribed autobiographically, confronts the problem of citizenship at the level of genre. Each chapter in this dissertation explores a particular autobiographical site at which the intimate and the geopolitical converge. Chaper 1 considers how Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation mobilizes what I call spatial rhetorics of memory in order to write the post-assimilationist, post-Holocaust immigrant subject. Chapter 2 asks what autobiographies of national and transnational displacement, namely Rea Tajiri's iii autobiographical film, History and Memory, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's multimedia anti-narrative, Dictée, reveal about the problem of witnessing and the geopolitics of trauma. Chapter 3 examines how Jamaica Kincaid's memoir of her brother's death from AIDS, My Brother, turns to multiple family members in order to write an autobiographical elegy informed by a transnational political aesthetic. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on three "border texts"—Norma Elia Cantú's "fictionalized autobioethnography," Canícula, Ruth Behar's feminist ethnography, Translated Woman, and Ursula Biemann's documentary film, Performing the Border—in order to interrogate the ethics and politics of cross-cultural and transnational writing and reading practices in an age of globalization. Ultimately, my project offers a significant new approach to the comparative study of ethnic American literatures, one that sees the nation as key in constructing identity, even as it is critiqued, remapped, or multiplied in a "post-national" world. iv for my grandmother and for Scott, with love v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Like autobiographies, dissertations are collaborative productions. This dissertation could not have been written without the wisdom, guidance, and support of my dissertation adviser, Wendy S. Hesford, and my dissertation committee, Julia Watson and Debra Moddelmog. Ivonne M. García, Susan Williams, Dana Oswald, Jennifer Camden, Angela Dancey, James Weaver, Scott Banville, and Cheryl Hindrichs have my warmest thanks for providing crucial feedback at various stages of the writing. Kathleen Gagel offered heartfelt friendship, encouragement, and scores of practical advice over the years, and for this she has my undying gratitude and affection. Special thanks to Jennifer Desiderio and Matthew Giordano, my mentors and confidantes, for simply everything. My dear parents, John and Barbara Kulbaga, provided unflagging support, insight, and perspective throughout the process. My cats, Chloe, and Sebastian, encouraged much- needed breaks and naps. And last but never least, my partner, Scott Galloway, provided the love, strength, and chocolate that sustained my work on a daily basis. vi VITA 1997……………………………………B.A. English, Baldwin-Wallace College 2000……………………………………M.A. English, The Ohio State University 2001-present……………………………Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS Research Publication 1. "Labored Realisms: Geopolitical Rhetoric and Asian American and Asian (Im)migrant Women's Auto/biography" with Wendy S. Hesford. JAC 32.1 (2003): 77-107. 2. "Labored Realisms: Geopolitical Rhetoric and Asian American and Asian (Im)migrant Women's Auto/biography" with Wendy S. Hesford. Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing in the North American West. Eds. Kathleen Boardman and Gioia Woods. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005. 302-337. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract……………………………………………………………………………….......iii Dedication…………………………………………………………………………….......vi Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………….vii Vita……………………………………………………………………………………...viii List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………..x Chapters: 1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………..........1 2. Chapter 1: Mapping 'a whole new geography': Lost in Translation and the Spatial Rhetorics of Memory…………………………………………....28 3. Chapter 2: Sites of Postmemory: The Geopolitics of Trauma in History and Memory and Dictée………………………………………………………………64 4. Chapter 3: Infectious Narratives: Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother and the Geopolitics of Witnessing AIDS……………………………………………….107 5. Chapter 4: Troubling the Signature: Cross-Cultural Auto/Biography at the U.S. Mexican Border………………………………………………………………...147 6. Afterword: Auto/Biography Studies in an Age of Terror………………………200 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………209 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 4.1 China Poblana One…………………………………………………………......161 4.2 China Poblana Two…………………………………………………………......161 4.3 Cowgirl ……………………………………………………………...................162 4.4 The Front Cover.……………………………………………………………......165 4.5 The Title Page.…………………………………………………………….........165 4.6 Mexican Citizen I…………………………………………………………….....166 4.7 Mexican Citizen II……………………………………………………………...166 4.8 Esperanza I……………………………………………………………………...173 4.9 Esperanza II…………………………………………………………………….173 ix INTRODUCTION Trans/National Subjects and the Geopolitics of Genre In the summer of 2004, everyone seemed to be talking about an extraordinary memoir written by an International Studies professor and Iranian immigrant to the United States, Azar Nafisi. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003) tells the story of a clandestine women's reading group that gathered weekly at the author's home in the Islamic Republic of Iran during the 1990s. The memoir became a sensation in the U.S. at the height of the "war on terror," spending over 100 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List and inspiring numerous reading groups around the country with its impassioned arguments about the democratic, revolutionary power of reading great works of English and American literature. Reviewers hailed it as a life-affirming treatise on individual and women's rights (Kakutani; Goldberg; Simpson). Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times proclaimed it to be "an eloquent brief on the transformative powers of fiction—on the refuge from ideology that art can offer to those living under tyranny, and art's affirmative