| Mother-Daughter Relationships in Asian and Jewish American Literatures: Story(ing) Identity engages, at times tacitly, in a three-way conversation. In analyzing the power of storytelling and its connection to the discovery of the self in six contemporary Jewish and Asian American women mother-daughter narratives, Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1981), Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), Tillie Olsen's "Tell Me A Riddle" and "I Stand Here Ironing" (1961), Daphne Merlon's Enchantment (1984), Kim Chernin's In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story (1983), and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), this dissertation is in dialogue with feminist theories about mother-daughter relationships, with academic debates concerning ethnicity, and with scholarship about literary genres, notably autobiography and life writing.; In focusing on this selection of texts, the purpose of this project is to discuss the range of topics that give most weight to the ways storytelling informs and shapes mother/daughter relationships. These issues include, but are not limited to, the uncertainties of identity formation, the dynamics of silence and speech, the strategies around memory (both individual and collective), and how they all inform the questions of identity and belonging and shape mother/daughter story-telling act(s).; In memorializing the fruits of these mothers' and daughters' efforts to understand one another, this dissertation questions the multiple oppressions---racial, gender, sexual, and economic---that have appropriated the experiences and history of these American minorities and engages the communities and histories that have been unjustly marginalized, silenced, and delegitimated by dominant groups and institutions. |
