Re-membering the body: Narrative and representation in Asian American literature (David Henry Hwang, Lois Ann Yamanka, Jessica Hagedorn)

Through a comparative analysis of David Henry Hwang's M Butterfly, Lois Ann Yamanka's Blu's Hanging, and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters, this dissertation considers the ways in which bodies challenge the categories asserted in nation building. It examines the body's significance in the dominant imaginings of such concepts as “Asia” and “America,” and designates the body as a contested terrain in and of itself.; Chapter One is a discussion of the ideological processes at work in nationalism both in its assertion that the nation is natural and self-evident, and in the way it seeks to suppress the irrational and contingent. The symbolic processes through which the U.S. constitutes it subjects as citizens is tied to the global dynamics of empire building and a suppressed history of American imperialism. Chapter One proposes the body as a site of both enormous symbolic work and symbolic production that has continued to dramatize the mapping of shifting representations of “America.”; Chapter Two addresses the contours of global politics, sexual politics, gender and racial identity in M Butterfly. This chapter illustrates the impossibility of thinking about racism and sexism as separate analytical discourses. It also reveals how both personal and public desire never belongs simply to the order of nature, but also to that of artifice. The work of the body in M Butterfly ultimately undermines any monolithic understanding of the relationship between self and society.; Chapter Three analyzes Blu's Hanging as an antithetical representation of the American family. It discloses the darker side of life in Hawaii and the subtle everyday realities that result from local and mainland nationalisms. Blu's Hanging is a novel that anticipates and addresses the crisis that cultural nationalism cannot resolve. The novel's young bodies-in-crisis expose the violations that arise when living bodies are cast as symbolic markers.; Chapter Four examines the narrative strategy of Dogeaters as a central inquiry into the politics of representation. In particular, the novel addresses the constraints imposed on women in the act of shaping a national history by asserting a contradictory and dynamic female embodiment written beyond the restraints of trite national allegory.; Chapter Five is a brief afterward on the irony and ambivalence of recognizing “Asian American” literature. The exposition of each of the proceeding chapters (in terms of bodies and the work they do) ultimately problematizes such a category.; In conclusion, this dissertation proposes that underwritten by the vast histories of American imperial migrations, there are texts and bodies which challenge and reconstitute the ever-vexed definition of “American.” In “re-membering” such bodies, the project proclaims our bodies as actual living texts, texts that are constantly bearing, contesting, and transforming meaning.