American Immigrant Writers and the New Global Literature
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University of Nevada, Reno Languages of Self: American Immigrant Writers and the New Global Literature A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English By Roula Kogos Dr. Cheryll Glotfelty/Dissertation Advisor May, 2014 © by Roula Kogos 2014 All Rights Reserved THE GRADUATE SCHOOL We recommend that the dissertation prepared under our supervision by ROULA KOGOS Entitled Languages of Self: American Immigrant Writers and the New Global Literature be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Cheryll Glotfelty, Ph. D, Advisor Ann Keniston, Ph. D, Committee Member Christopher Coake, MFA, Committee Member Dennis Dworkin, Ph. D, Committee Member Greta de Jong, Ph. D, Graduate School Representative David W. Zeh, Ph. D., Dean, Graduate School May, 2014 i Abstract In a global era, identity categories take on new meanings as globalized communities and all their accompanying tokens of identification (social, political, and personal) are formed and placed into competition with previously-held national and local identities. This dissertation explores the ways in which immigrant writers have conceived of identity, grappling not only with the social conditions which give rise to individual and collective identities, but also how these projects are depicted in the literary form. It’s clear that an emerging subcategory of writers exists, particularly among immigrant writers, whose literature not only reflects, but also attempts to articulate the concerns of globalization. Because globalization directly impacts our view of interconnections between people, in other words, our notions of community and interpersonal connections, it also directly influences our view of the self and how social and personal identities are formed. It is natural, then, to speak simultaneously of globalization and identity when discussing the impacts globalization has had on the body of American literature. Furthermore, because immigrants are the most socially and economically vulnerable to the forces of globalization, the fiction of immigrant writers tends to strongly reflect transnational discourses on identity. Interconnectivity becomes important for these authors as they create their own sense of community on top of the nation and beyond its boundaries. The literary inheritance of writing produced from the ashes of postmodernism and contemporary globalization, from deterritorialization and interconnectivity, promotes writing that creates a new sense of community. In this project, I limit discussion to immigrant and first-generation writers, to those who have ii been most directly affected by global forces, in order to examine the ways in which globalization has influenced discussions of identity, and in turn, contemporary American literature. Through close readings of Adeline Yen Mah’s Falling Leaves, Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, Junot Díaz’s Drown, and Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s Sightseeing, issues which affect contemporary discourses on globalization and identity such as power, marginality, time, space, and history are explored along with their impact on the body of what I term “globalized American literature.” iii Acknowledgements The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the knowledge, support, and encouragement of my advisor, my committee members, my friends, and my family. I would like to thank Dr. Cheryll Glotfelty for being the most tireless and dedicated committee chair I could have ever hoped for. I would like to thank my committee members, Ann Keniston, Chris Coake, Dennis Dworkin, and Greta de Jong for never giving up on me and making the revision process a smooth one. For always being there to lift my spirits and keep me going, I want to thank Gail Hensley, Lara Hansen, and all my friends in Sacramento. And to my family, I extend my deepest gratitude for helping keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach. To each of you, in the humblest words I can, I thank you. iv Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: Immigrant Writers and the Global Context..................................1 Chapter 2: The Postmodern Immigrant Autobiography in a Transnational Era: Global Influences in Adeline Yen Mah’s Falling Leaves.................................................20 Chapter 3: The Influences of Postmodernism and Globalization: Interconnectivity across Time, Space, and History in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project..............54 Chapter 4: “You Need to Learn How to Walk the World”: Identity and Transnational Social Collectives in Junot Díaz’s Drown...........................................................106 Chapter 5: Marginality and Transnational Feminism in Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s Sightseeing...........................................................................................................167 Chapter 6: Conclusion: Globalization and Globalized Literature....................................209 Works Cited.....................................................................................................................218 1 Chapter 1: Introduction: Immigrant Writers and the Global Context Judith Butler reflects, “I’m permanently troubled by identity categories, consider them to be invariable stumbling-blocks, and understand them, even promote them, as sites of necessary trouble” (709). In a global era, identity categories as sites of necessary trouble take on new meanings as global communities and all their accompanying tokens of identification (social, political, personal) are formed and placed into competition with previously-held national and local identities. Where do the stumbling blocks or dissonances lie between each mode of identification, between social identities created within the nation and without it, between personal identities forced to navigate so many new categories? And why, in Butler’s words, should these new global identities be promoted as sites of “necessary trouble”? While defining the new symbols and standards of global culture is beyond the scope of any singular project, linkages between discussions of identity, literary studies, and globalization studies have begun to emerge. For example, James Annesley argues in favor of globalization as a lens through which “the shape and character of concerns that have a key bearing on the interpretation of contemporary cultural, social and political life” can be read via contemporary fiction (6). He writes, “Stepping beyond postmodernism’s preoccupation with representation and simulation and avoiding its Eurocentric bias, arguments linked to globalization promise more productive ways of interpreting the relationships that link culture with socioeconomic conditions” (10). Annesley’s argument is echoed in the works of a number of other literary scholars studying the impacts of globalization on American fiction. Paul Jay, for example, argues “Since the rise of critical theory in the 1970s, nothing has reshaped literary and cultural studies more than its embrace of transnationalism” and links these changes to civil rights and other social-political movements which influenced theoretical developments within the academy (1). He notes that 2 transnational thought has productively complicated nationalist paradigms embedded within the disciplines and has “transformed the nature of the locations we study, and focused our attention on forms of cultural production that take place in the liminal spaces between real and imagined borders” (1). Similarly, Rachel Adams, like Jay and Annesley, also stresses interconnections and pragmatic responses to real-world social inequalities over postmodernism’s tendencies toward experimentalism and the isolation of the individual. She delineates postmodernist fiction as characterized by disconnection, by solipsism and paranoia, and by the notion that personal connections may be nothing more than the figments for an individual imagination, while “the literature of globalization represents them as the shared perception of a community whereby, for better or for worse, populations in one part of the world are inevitably affect by the events in another” (268). Like it or not, in a world where we are continuously connected to one another via information technologies, a sense of disconnection, in the postmodernist sense of rootlessness and isolation, is becoming increasingly impossible. The literary inheritance of writing produced from the ashes of postmodernism and contemporary globalization, from deterritorialization and interconnectivity, does not produce an even more disconnected for of postmodernism, Diane Krumrey argues, rather it promotes writing that creates a new sense of community. For writers influenced by globalization, particularly immigrant writers, “Theirs is a confidence in the unsettledness, a confidence in their ability to navigate and survive it. Fragmentation and discontinuous reality produce a paradoxical sense of possibility. These authors reinscribe an indeterminate international space on the surface of America and American culture” (38). For Krumrey, like Jay, Adams, and Annesley, the literature influenced by globalization, or what I shall simply refer to as “globalized American 3 literature,” interconnectivity becomes important for these authors as they create their own sense of community on top of the nation and beyond its boundaries. Although I am not proposing that all contemporary literature has been influenced by globalization equally, or even in precisely the same ways,