Organizer: Meiling Wu, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Chair: John W. Chaffee, State University of New York, Binghamton
Discussant: Sidonie Smith, University of Michigan
The purpose of this proposal is to raise the issues of identity politics and to pursue the possibilities of cultural reconciliation among different Asian American groups. This panel will focus on the fashioning of postcolonial identity in the context of gender, ethnical and cultural representation. Each paper of this panel offers a specific perspective in analyzing the selected texts, and it also challenges the other panelist’s perception of Asian/American Women identity.
While all the papers are interrelated, the issues of identity politics will be raised first by Lisa Yun’s argument of "butterflied" imagination of Asia, then will be cross-examined by Karen Chow’s criticism of the imagined consumption and reproduction. Yun examines butterfly as one of the central paradigms of Western cultural attitudes toward Asia, eventually affecting the identity politics of Asian Americans. The attention will be paid to literary and dramatic narratives of butterfly as integral to reflecting and shaping past perceptions as well as contemporary cultural attitudes and sociopolitical practices of "West" toward "East." For Chow, the consumption of American goods generates the construction of American images. From the close reading of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, Chow discusses how America is tied up with images mediated and circulated in films and pictures, and thus becoming American occurs through consumptive viewing as well as through visual re-enactment of these images. This logic of image consumerism can be extended to the beauty contests in the Philippines while cultural consumerism closely related to the identity formation of transnational Asian American women.
Followed by Meiling Wu’s interrogation of the alter-native revision of Chinese/American images, Seungsook Moon traces the constitution of Korean/American women’s "shifting identities." Wu develops a theory of alter-native positionalities which are hypothesized as located inside/outside two worlds, Chinese vis-i-vis American. Wu’s observation of the image revision in the works of Pearl S. Buck, Eileen Chang and Amy Tan exposes the fallacies of both literary and cultural representation of Chinese/American women. Seungsook Moon examines the discourse on diaspora and identity in light of life stories narrated by the first-generation Korean/American immigrant women living in the state of New York. Moon’s collaborated interviews illustrate that the liberatory potential of diasporaic identity is significantly circumscribed by exigencies of immigrant life as well as social structures of inequalities.
Prostituting Asian Women in Colonial and Postcolonial Imagination
Lisa Yun, State University of New York, Binghamton
Narratives of the "Oriental Butterfly" have been popularized through European and American literature and drama (the most famous of these being Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly) and have continued to proliferate over the past century. The paper investigates the evolving oeuvre of cultural and historical productions of "Butterfly" in the context of colonialist, imperialist, and neocolonialist discourses, with comparative analysis and critique of selected narratives (including memoirs, plays, operas, musicals) from the 1880s to the 1990s.
As a pervasive cultural fetish mapped in particular narrative frames, "Butterfly" is established as a modern mythology and transnational narrative that is integral to shaping present-day cultural attitudes and social practices. "Butterflied" aesthetics with a racialized alchemy of sexuality and gender are linked to Western cultural and geopolitical attitudes towards Asia, Asian women and men, and by extension, are significantly linked to the identity politics of Asian Americans.
In this context, constructions of the Asian prostitute, wife, war bride, mail-order bride, and initial conceptions of the Amerasian, Eurasia interracial relationship and biracial child, also will be examined.
Cultural Consumerism and Transnational Asian American Women in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters
Karen Chow, University of Connecticut
In Asia, the mythic appeal of America is found in how it represents the luxury of excess: generous amounts of food, large expanses of interior and exterior spaces, lavish entertainment, seemingly bottomless opportunities for wealth. These imagines sell well, which is evident by the popularity of American food, movies, and clothing brands. But the presence of American consumer goods in Asia is also depicted as gaudily out of place, a reminder of western cultural imperialism in Asia, and an example of the ‘third world’ emulating or desiring the ‘first world.’ That is, a seemingly bottomless Asian appetite for American goods presumedly affirms America’s cultural superiority over Asia.
The consumption of goods, however, is driven by a consumption of images, and consuming images of America, as Jessica Hagedorn exemplifies in her novel Dogeaters, do not merely emulate America; that is, Asian consumption of American images participates in the formation of an increasingly transnational Asian American community identity, a community that is maintained by the circulation of those images of America and Asia in literature and film. The circulation of American images in Asia that are recirculated in Asian cultural productions viewed by American audiences enacts, in the sense of a display of familiar western iconographic images in an unfamiliar, even foreign eastern context, a culturally dialogic, transnational ‘Asian American community.’
Hagedorn describes the performance of hyper-real beauty that function as life-scripts for Filipina women. For several women characters in Dogeaters, performative beauty determines their life-scripts, although in different ways. In Manila, the venue of the beauty contest and the talent show are the path to wealth and fame. Therefore, feminist resistance constitutes a process that begins with dissatisfaction and progresses to self-transformation, and the narrative generates an imagined transnational Asian American women’s community.
Revising the Alter-Native Imagines of Chinese American Women
Meiling Wu, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
This paper is to explore the problematic of revising the images of Chinese American women, with emphasis on the alter-native literary representation. Through the comparison of the selected works of Pearl S. Buck, of Eileen Chang and of Amy Tan, the issues of image production and consumption will be discussed. This essay hypothesizes an alter-native status in order to closely examine the motivation of revising the Chinese American women images and the identity complexity of being American, being Chinese and being woman.
The alter-native status equips with more than two binary identities. Tracing the Latin root of the word alternative will gain an insight into the realm of the theory of alter-native.
[Latin] alter, a, um=the other
[Latin] nativus, a, um= the native
[English] alternative= alter+ native=the other + the native.
As alter-native contains attributes of both other and native, the theory of alter-native parallels and defies the attempts to deconstruct the literary canons and to de/colonization. Moreover, otherness and nativeness are also implied in the Chinese term (ling-lei).
[Chinese] (ling)= other; another, separate; extra; in addition; besides
[Chinese] (lei)= native; similar; alike; a class; a race; a type; a kind; a category
[combined] (ling-lei)= another kind; alternative
Besides the permutation and combination of (ling-1ei) which constitutes the possibilities of being other, native, other-native and native-other, the radicals of the two words also indicate the predetermined principle of being alter-native—that is, representation and power.
Furthermore, this paper also generates discussion of the comparative merits and distinctions of concepts such as "mother," "daughter," "daughter-in-law," "prostitute," and "new womanhood." From the observation of the revised Chinese/American women images in the representations of Buck, Chang and Tan, the invisible power will be revealed.
Negotiating Diaspora: Patriarchy, Class, and Christianity in the Lives of Korean Immigrant Women
Seungsook Moon, Vassar College
Influenced by the rise of poststructuralism across various disciplines, studies of identity have emphasized its fluid, hybrid, heterogeneous, and even contradictory nature. In particular, the poststructuralist appropriation of diaspora and identity tends to glorify migrant marginality as a perennial mode of release and even transcendence, and celebrate hybridity without discussing hardship of immigrant life accompanied by alienation and social isolation as well as downward social mobility.
This paper examines the two points of contention discussed above in light of life stories narrated by Korean immigrant women who have lived in upstate New York. Based on ethnographic data collected through in-depth interviews of ten women, this paper argues the following points. First, while some of the women sought migration as a strategy to relieve themselves from various constraints they faced in South Korea, they do not interpret their experiences of diaspora as liberating release in the context of ethnic marginalization. Rather, by utilizing resources available to them, these women negotiate with their shifting identities in the contexts of family, workplace, and the Korean church. Second, they attempt to ground their identities as mothers, Christians, or both while their narratives point to the multiple and fragmentary nature of diasporic identity.