Cultural Mediations in Contemporary Asian American and Latina/o Migrant Fiction

My project contests the tendency to read immigration as the primary migration pattern in Asian American and Latina/o fiction. Such a reading privileges the U.S. as a teleological end to an arduous journey---the land of liberation, freedom, and greater rights from the ways of the Old World/"Third World." In contrast to these readings, I examine the ramifications involved when the U.S. is not the final destination for movement between countries. The narratives of my project feature protagonists who are the offspring of Latino and Asian immigrants going abroad to the land of their ancestors. In doing so, they complicate previous representations of the U.S. by revealing how U.S. involvement in other countries, through military, cultural, and economic imperialism can create the need to immigrate in the first place---a reality erased by an exclusive focus on immigration.;In offering an alternative analytic for Asian and Latina/o migrant fiction, my dissertation engages cultural studies' theories of the interplay of the cultural and the economic. In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams critiques orthodox Marxism's economic determinism for positing a mimetic relationship between culture and the economic, and instead offers his theory of mediation, whereby the economic and the cultural determine one another mutually (97). Stuart Hall takes up the issue of mediation in "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity," by showing that "global mass culture" cooperates with "postmodern" globalization to further U.S. neo-colonialism; he observes that the economic processes of neo-colonialism cannot occur without the cultural, ideological component. While noting how culture can thus perpetuate U.S. economic dominance, Hall also shows that culture exists at the realm where the notion of the West as total is challenged (34).;The authors of my project negotiate this dual notion of culture as aiding and contesting U.S. neo-colonialism. I focus on post-1990s texts to show that much recent fiction self-consciously engages with issues of globalization; the authors of my project challenge the predominant conceptualization of globalization as an economic phenomenon by highlighting the intersection of interpersonal relations with geo-economic positions. In contending that the texts, by offering possibilities of alternative identifications not organized around the nation-state, point to the increasing need to situate cross-cultural alliances within globalization, I use the following novels: Lawrence Chua's Gold By the Inch (1998), Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), Don Lee's Country of Orgin (2004), and Achy Obejas' Days of Awe (2001).