| This dissertation is an interdisciplinary investigation into the mutually constitutive relationship between dress signifiers and Asian American identities in Asian American literature in the 1990s. It extends Roland Barthes' concept of "written clothing" and draws on insights of fashion theories to unpack the representations of identities within dress signifiers and to contextualize them within larger discursive structures and embodied practices. The dissertation reads Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters (1990), Mavis Hara's "Carnival Queen" (1991), and Chay Yew's A Language of Their Own (1994) and A Beautiful Country (1998) in order to argue that there is no grand narrative of progress, or a totalizing Asian American history, but diverse narratives and affective experiences refracting Asian American negotiation of and resistance to the embedded meanings of race in the construction of national identity and the U.S. nation. These literary texts turn to a network of dress references to remember Asian American immigration history, U.S. imperialist interests in Southeast Asia, and their resulting taxonomy of identities. This study suggests that the relationship between the Asian American body and dress these texts describe functions as an archive of memory as well as a resource to understand and trace the historical and demographic shifts in U.S. society in the 1990s. In this sense, these texts not only interrogate the management of national identity and the discourse of hygiene within and beyond the spatial borders of the U.S., but they also raise the matter of connective histories that interlink mainland U.S. to Hawaii and countries in Southeast Asia such as the Philippines. |
