Language
English
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Through a comparative reading of two important transnational Asian American texts, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, I argue that multiplicity of narration may, but does not always, resist the imposition of culturally dominant aesthetic modes, especially historical and nationalist narratives and multiculturalism. While Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange delegates narrative power to seven characters, it ultimately stages an ambiguous clash of discourses with a multiculturalist historicizing voice that is limited by its own contradictory impulses to control and containment. The novel dialogizes its excessive tendencies by scripting plural-but-discrete identities. In contrast, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters diffuses its perspectives nearly (or potentially) infinitely, and this infinite multiplication of voices that represents a more direct critique of power. The novel juxtaposes voices from multiple social strata, differing sexual identities, and diverse genres; there is such a profusion of radically different perspectives that the novel makes it impossible for any single voice to dominate. The purpose of this comparative analysis is to begin to understand the specific relationships between resistant cultural formations and material political structures as well as to situate these two novels in the context of what Rachel Adams has termed “American literary globalism.” Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts is also an important frame for the argument, though the article extends her contentions about the useful contradictions of Asian American identity from the political, legal, and economic realm into the aesthetic.
DOI
10.55917/2154-2171.1083
Recommended Citation
Lawrence, Patrick S.
(2016)
"Rehistoricizing Differently, Differently: American Literary Globalism and Disruptions of Neo-Colonial Discourse in Tropic of Orange and Dogeaters,"
Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies: Vol. 7, Article 4.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55917/2154-2171.1083
Available at:
https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/aaldp/vol7/iss1/4