| Drawing on theories of race and nation, American cultural studies, and postcolonial theory, this study investigates the mutually constitutive nature of nationalism and transnationalism in Asian American literature. Examining works from a variety of genres and ethnicities, I analyze how authors use Asia and their own "Asian" heritages to assert their membership within the United States. Incorporating the unifying discourses of home, family, and country while also highlighting their Asian ancestry, these writers simulate a global community while subtly situating that community within an American context. By tracing the nation-building rhetoric emerging from the nation's margins posing as the global center, I illuminate the tangled relationship between the global and the local and map out more specifically the contradictory interdependence of multiculturalism, nationalism, and transnationalism in Asian American literature.; In a study that questions the prematurity of the declining nation, under assault from multiculturalist and transnationalist movements, I demonstrate that Asian American writers in the postmodern age reverse the terms of their previous alienation by employing the rhetoric of diversity (national and global) to resurrect national borders. These Asian American mothers, patriots, and diplomats employ a rhetoric of reconciliation that attests to the Asian American history of displacement and isolation while simultaneously transcending the "difference" that has marked them. I explore the significance of Asian American authors' use of global and multicultural "difference" to reconstruct national narratives that have previously excluded them, and the repercussions that such a move might have on theories of race, ethnicity, and nationalism in the global, transnational, and postmodern eras. |
