Authentic reproductions: The making and re-making of more Asian Americans in 'Donald Duk', 'Bone', and 'Native Speaker'

This dissertation is concerned with the construction of race via narrative as played out in three novels written by Asian American authors. The dissertation argues that in literature as in everyday life, race is enacted and produced by language, and through the repetition of gestures and practices. It assesses narrative as a performance that both enacts and produces racial meanings. By focusing on the formation of racialized subjectivity within Frank Chin's Donald Duk, Fae Myenne Ng's Bone, and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, the dissertation interrogates the mechanics of this formation. It contends that through narrative, literary texts can displace hegemonic and nihilistic meanings of race.;The dissertation also posits a genealogy that maps Asian American origins as unstable. The novels discussed respond to this instability in three notable ways: Donald Duk expresses an anxiety over indeterminacy, and strives to establish a unitary origin; Bone reconstructs alternate origins; while Native Speaker contests the relevance of origins by attempting to generate simulacra, or copies of copies that exist without an original. By examining these literary perspectives towards origins, and the productive power of narrative, the making and re-making Asian American subjectivities reveals itself to be a process that involves a tension between tradition and invention. In this process, tradition is reinvented in a way that alters the past to make it relevant to the present. History thus reasserts itself and is transformed by the present. Although limited by an “ontological bearing,” acts of representation and reinvention have the ability to challenge notions of authenticity by disputing the idea of static origins. When origins cannot be traced, they must be reinvented. This reinvention is evident in the making and re-making of Asian America.