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Abstract
The research aims to examine the politics of displacement in literary texts and theories, as it relates to the treatment of displaced minorities, termed discursively as “displaced lives”, with a twofold focus. First, the treatment of displacement in ethnic texts and theories are examined through the praxis of multiculturalism in the United States and the nuances of teaching texts and theories that reflects this multicultural practice. Second, I evaluate the ethics of interaction with the other that emerges out of this encounter. In the first section of the dissertation, I address the larger question of how ethnic studies, especially Asian American Studies interacts with Western theories and literatures concerning displacement and portrayal of displaced lives and epistemologically disrupts the understanding of gender, race and transnationalism in the treatment of displaced minorities. In doing so, in the second part, I identify an original space of Asian American consciousness in American interactions with Asia through discourses of diaspora, knowledge, gender and religion. This original space termed as Evanescence reconsiders and destabilizes the ethics of interaction between the self and the other in the treatment of displaced lives.
The major literature texts I use for the analysis of theoretical concepts and paradigms are Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Nora Okja Keller’s The Comfort Women, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasimine, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic. My theoretical range is wide and varied and includes Western theorists on displacement and diaspora, a range of Western ethical theoretical concepts and Asian American theorists. In terms of space and time the research roughly spans the time period from the colonial imperial era, the advent of the Chinese in the Unites States for the Transcontinental Railroad to the concerns of modern migratory refugee and immigration patterns. Geographically, the research conducts itself in the diasporic sense of connecting countries and cultures of origins with their host ones, hence encompassing the histories, cultures and patterns of migrations of Asian emigres to their arrival and assimilation in the U.S.
The major literature texts I use for the analysis of theoretical concepts and paradigms are Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Nora Okja Keller’s The Comfort Women, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasimine, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic. My theoretical range is wide and varied and includes Western theorists on displacement and diaspora, a range of Western ethical theoretical concepts and Asian American theorists. In terms of space and time the research roughly spans the time period from the colonial imperial era, the advent of the Chinese in the Unites States for the Transcontinental Railroad to the concerns of modern migratory refugee and immigration patterns. Geographically, the research conducts itself in the diasporic sense of connecting countries and cultures of origins with their host ones, hence encompassing the histories, cultures and patterns of migrations of Asian emigres to their arrival and assimilation in the U.S.