| Contemporary Asian American urban narratives refer to the post-1960 s novels set in the American cities in the context of globalization and authored by the Asian American writers,which focus on how Asian Americans,along with the other urban marginalized groups,transgress and subvert the established spatial injustice in the American cities,thereby reconstructing the urban spatial justice as well as remapping their location in the cities.The Asian American urban narratives revisit the major themes in Asian American literature,including,among others,the construction of subjectivity,historiographic revision,ethnic languages,diasporatic cultures,gender equality and civil rights,reflecting a broader context of the political disputes in contemporary race,gender and even the canon revision in the process of globalization and urbanization.On the basis of the existing scholarship in Asian American literature criticism,the dissertation aims to pursue an interdisciplinary line of inquiry of the Asian American urban narratives by drawing on established and emergent theories about space,particularly urban space,as well as insights from cultural studies in both the humanities and the social sciences.To better explore the spatial imagination in Asian American urban narratives and to further fathom the nuanced aspects of the politics of space as well as spatial poetics in their narrative strategies,this dissertation focuses on six carefully selected representative novels of the Asian American urban narratives as the textual illustrations.Along with the social and historical context of the Asian Americans,the dissertation aims to elaborate the politics of space in the Asian urban narratives highlighted by the theme of “seeking spatial justice”,which is foregrounded by “remapping the ethnic space”,“re-exploiting the discursive space”,“remolding the political space” and “reconstructing the gender space”,thereby illustrating how these texts strive to challenge and subvert the production of the spatial injustice by the dominant power,and to open up spaces of social justice for the Asian communities as well as the other urban marginalized groups.To see how ethnic space is remapped in Asian urban narratives,the dissertation will first explore how the Asian American flaneurs/flaneries interweave their spatial experience ofmobility,especially that of “transgression” and “urban walking”,with the urban landscapes inscribed with the ethnic palimpsest histories and memories.The mobility of flaneurs challenges the established racial segregation,undermines the stereotypical representations of ethnic ghettos,foregrounds the marginalized places and the invisible lives of the ethnic community,and ultimately,transforms the spatial connotations of the ethnic enclaves into a site of resistance to assimilation,a space inscribed with the ethnic memories,and a vibrant multicultural neighborhood of the American city;Asian American flaneurs/flaneries' strolling in the cities,moreover,can be read as a mode of identity construction and a claim of the right to the city,a move that subverts hyphenated space of Asian American identity and facilitates the construction of Asian American identity.?To examine how the discursive space is re-exploited in Asian urban narratives,the dissertation focuses on two highly pertinent spaces,the space of language and the space of knowledge.Language becomes a space of contention because when dominant power installs a Received Standard English as the norm of the metropolitan language,the voices of the minorities are suppressed and their rights to speak up are disclaimed.The characters examined in this dissertation,wary of the detrimental hegemony of language space,all try to establish their position as “speaking subjects” through using hybrid ethnic languages and through reshaping of a multilingual landscape of American cities,thereby challenging the hegemony of metropolitan discourse dominated by RS-English.As for the knowledge space,the dissertation will explore the production of injustice where Asian Americans are either silenced or stereotyped in the knowledge space represented by educational institutions,public museums,libraries and the urban cartography constructed by the establishment.The characters in these texts resist the established spatial distribution of knowledge monopolized by the dominant ideologies via the spatial practices of highlighting alternative history and counter-memory,so as to re-inscribe and reshape a heterogeneous,all-inclusive and fluid knowledge space.In terms of the remolding of the political space,this dissertation analyses two dominantmodes of discourse that politically hold Asian Americans and other ethnic groups in subjugation: the American Puritan discourse and the discourse of imperialism in the global context.To break through the confines of political space,Asian Americans and other urban disadvantaged groups reclaim their discursive position through the spatial practices of “occupying and advancing from the peripheries to the center”,such as the democratic elections in the urban public sphere and the transnational grassroots movements,thereby eliminating geographical or conceptual boundaries,acquiring the civil rights and challenging imperial supremacy through the integration of cross-border,cross-ethnic and cross-class communities.These moves remold America as a freshly conceptualized “city upon a hill”,one that embraces heterogeneity and embodies spatial justice.The reconstruction of gender space will be addressed from the two dimensions,that of gender space established by the patriarchy/racism-dominated culture,and that of the urban women's living space.The elaboration will first examine how the Asian American characters in the text are subject to the gender performance of the white gaze in the patriarchy/racism-dominated gender space.Specifically,the Asian women are reduced to the marginalized others in the domestic space,the absentees of the public space as well as the object of the white male's gaze;Asian males,however,are confined to the“emasculation space” represented by the bachelor communities and the “effemination space” represented by the feminized occupations under the manipulation of the state apparatus and the white Phallus-Logocentrism.In addition,the reading will examine how Asian American women facilitate what bell hook might call “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness” and the everyday practice of what de Certeau might call“tactics”to resist the various spatial violence and the race/gender/class suppression,thus reintegrating the ethnic community.In addition,with the perspective of the spatial domination technology based on the body,the reading will explore how Asian American women characters in the texts facilitate their bodies to reoccupy the urban public space marked by the patriarchy/racism to dismantle the dominance of the white males in the city landscapes;meanwhile the discussion will focus on how their raced,gendered anddisciplined bodies are transformed as a space to display heterogeneous culture and to protest against colonial hegemony,so as to make it a site to represent the collective memories and establish the living space for the Asian American women in the cities.Asian American urban narratives,as the present study indicates,re-imagine and re-represent American urban space as much as they produce an interventional American cityscape,transforming through textual maneuver the cultural and political landscapes of American cities;Besides,the spatial practices and strategies highlighted by contemporary Asian American urban narratives also reveal their uniqueness.These strategies not only reveal the impact of spatially reinforced social isolation,cultural marginalization,and political exclusion on Asian Americans identity formation and subject constitution,but they also demonstrate the possibilities of resistance and intervention through everyday spatial practices by the urban Asian Americans,which can be regarded as the politics of eliminating spatial injustice and pursuing spatial justice. |
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