| This study explores the operation of power as it configures space, mapping out and maintaining sites of domination and oppression, of production and of difference wherein culture is produced, identity is constructed, and literature is created. Literary representation, I argue, is an important site of its own which articulates a presence where dominant society desires absence, that voices a position where power demands silence, and which asserts a culture of difference where hegemony dictates conformity. The literature of specific minority American communities clearly reveals how a topography of power shapes the minority American community--physically, psychologically, socially, economically, and aesthetically.; Chapter 1, "Space, Race, and Representation," introduces literary and anthropological theory with regard to power and space and discusses minority literature as an imaginative intervention in social relations that articulates a space for identity juxtaposed "in and against" state power. Chapter 2, "Reading San Francisco: The Chinatown Aesthetic and the Architecture of Racial Identity," examines the history of juridical, economic and political structures that created Chinatown and offers a discussion of Chinese American literature. Chapter 3, "Violating the Border: Subjectivity in the Space of the Chicano/a" analyzes works by Anaya, Anzaldua, Moraga, Rivera, and Cisneros in a discussion of violence as the origin of identity. Chapter 4, "On the Outskirts of Internment: the State, the Economy and the Origin of the Japanese American Community" discusses how the state created the space of Japanese American historical and literary identity. Chapter 5 "Structures of Southern Space and the Literary Supplement" analyzes Imperium in Imperio and theoretical approaches to minority American literature. |
