Translating cultures and re-writing boundaries: Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

This study examines "the feminine" and "the other" in the works of three Asian North American women writers, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, from a (cross-)cultural studies perspective. "The feminine" is that which makes "feminine literature," a term coined by Marguerite Duras, to designate "an organic, translated writing... translated from blackness, from darkness." In translating the blackness and darkness, Kingston, Kogawa, and Cha create an existence and assert an identity out of the invisibility, the darkness, the blackness, of being the other sex of the other Americans. Being the other has also to do with boundaries or the question of legitimacy. Writing, translating, or "naming," as Kingston calls it, is a way of giving legitimacy to that other. I argue that in their respective act of translating cultures, Kingston, Kogawa, and Cha create a unique language of their own; it is a language of both sounds and silence that sets them apart from their mothers and gives them a voice which, in addition to re-presenting their people, articulates a cross-cultural female subjectivity. The result is that each one of them individually defines her time and space, charting a feminist "carto-historiography.".