Untying tongues: Translation, culture, and identity in Asian American literature

The purpose of my dissertation, "Untying Tongues: Translation, Culture, and Identity in Asian American Literature," is to investigate the multifarious forms that the language of Asian Americans may take in Asian American Literature. These forms lead to a consideration of the development of Asian pidgin English and its textual representations; an overview of the history of Asian language representation in Anglo American Literature, especially as this representation sets standards for Asian American writers; and an examination of Asian American writers' experimentation with language as a means of critically engaging the idea of the foreign in the land of freedom, equality, and opportunity. I study a wide range of linguistic forms, from Standard American English to regional vernacular expressions to pidgin dialects to hip hop vernacular. Because my dissertation negotiates a dynamic assemblage of issues as they relate to language, culture, and identity in Asian American Literature, I mean to establish a critical methodology that will draw theoretical concepts and analytical tools from a number of areas, including Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Postcolonial Theory. Translation in particular not only serves as a useful way to think of linguistic representation and the transcription of dialects, it also provides a method by which to consider intersemiotic relations between cultural forms, such as music and photography, as they are represented and utilized in literary texts. In my analyses, I consider language within these works as variously a site of protest or negotiation, compromise or resistance, appeal or submission, as writers explore personal and collective identities that might be assimilated to or oppose a larger American identity. Ultimately, my dissertation establishes a means by which observations about culture and identity can be conceptualized through these language representations.