English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item GENRES OF MEMORY AND ASIAN/AMERICAN WOMEN’S ACTIVISM(2022) Bramlett, Katie; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As human rights and racial inequality dominate public discourse, it has become increasingly clear that Americans are invested in conversations of public memory. The removal of confederate monuments and demands for equity in memorialization for people of color underscore the point that who is remembered and how they are honored is important. Further, the growing awareness of violence against Asian/Americans and the hate crime against Asian/American women in Atlanta has emphasized the need to understand the history of violence against Asian/Americans, Asian/American gendered stereotypes, and the Asian/American activists who fight for equal rights. This dissertation examines three distinct memorial genres—a statue, a traveling exhibit, and a documentary—created by Asian/Americans about Asian/American women activists. My interdisciplinary research engages feminist memory studies, Asian/American studies, and cultural rhetorics to investigate how public memory activists leverage the affordances of different memorial genres to recover Asian/American women’s activism. I consider the ways Asian/American women’s memorials contest the past and navigate the politics of memorialization to influence the present. Each chapter considers how memorials not only remember past activism, but also work to reframe current conversations about Asian/American women in more just and equitable frameworks. I claim that my chosen memorials are created by memorial activists and each seek to expand U.S. memory beyond traditional gendered stereotypes that are pervasive in the United States.Item Isamu Dreams of Flying(2015) Kauffman, Ashlie; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Fictionalized events in the life of Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) are woven with the story of a boy fascinated with airplanes, who grows up to be an artist. This section shows Isamu and his mother, Leonie Gilmour, traveling to Japan to live with his father, poet Yone Noguchi. In Japan, Isamu is raised solely by Leonie. He is surprised when she gives birth to his sister, the dancer Ailes Gilmour. Facing racial discrimination and feeling envy toward Ailes, he departs in 1918 for boarding school in Indiana. Interspersed with this is the story of a boy, David, who builds a model airplane that he wishes to show his mother when he visits her for a week. Raised by his father, he is envious of attention his mother gives her boyfriend. As an adult, David begins dating a woman named Elizabeth, before he moves to Japan to teach art.Item The Ghost as Ghost: Compulsory Rationalism and Asian American Literature, Post-1965(2014) Davis, Lawrence-Minh Bui; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the early 1980s, scholarship across disciplines has employed the "ghostly" as critical lens for understanding the upheavals of modernity. The ghost stands metaphorically for the lasting trace of what has been erased, whether bodies or histories. The ghost always stands for something, rather than the ghost simply is--a conception in keeping with dominant Western rationalism. But such a reading practice threatens the very sort of violent erasure it means to redress, uncovering lost histories at the expense of non-Western and "minority" ways of knowing. What about the ghost as ghost? What about the array of non-rational knowledges out of which the ghostly frequently emerges? This project seeks to transform the application of the ghostly as scholarly lens, bringing to bear Foucault's notion of "popular" knowledges and drawing from Asian American studies and critical mixed race studies frameworks. Its timeline begins with the 1965 Immigration Act and traces across the 1970s to 1990s rise of multiculturalism and the 1980s to 2000s rise of the Multiracial Movement. For field of analysis, the project turns to Asian American literature and its rich evocations of the ghostly and compulsory rationalism, in particular Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men, Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge, Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother, Shawna Yang Ryan's Water Ghosts, and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being. It outlines a new reading strategy, a new means of conceiving of both Asian American literature and existing "spectral" scholarship as cultural productions. It also addresses a dimension of American history and lived reality that scholarship to date has not only ignored but actively suppressed. And insofar as the reach of "spectral" scholarship extends well beyond Asian American communities and Asian American studies--across an interdisciplinary net of subjects, a cross-cultural set of histories--this project is a necessary corrective with a wide scope of consequence for scholarly practice more generally. What it offers is an alternative approach, an alternative vision, reaching for a progressive politics of the ghostly.Item Model Minority(2013) Kim, David; Mitchell, Emily; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The stories in my thesis explore race politics, the American Dream, the influence of hip-hop in suburban society, and the role of academia in identity formation. The stories feature a Korean-American narrator whose speech undergoes significant transformations, which mirror the constantly shifting circumstances of his life. Change is the overarching theme of my thesis - the kind of change that transpires unconsciously - and the narrator's primary conflict is the struggle to reconcile the multiple identities that have been created as a result.Item Megatextual Readings: Accessing an Archive of Korean/American Constructions(2006-05-10) Chung, Tracy; Chuh, Kandice; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation formulates an approach to reading Korean/American narratives through what I call a "megatext" in order to understand the uneven and dynamic production of Korean/Americanness. By advancing a "megatextual" approach to conceiving of identity and politics, I argue for a way of addressing the critical gap Asian Americanist practitioners continue to witness between activist demands for social justice and scholarly articulations of those demands. A megatextual approach seeks to be an alternative reading practice that bridges different realms of knowledge production. Megatexts argue for a practice of reading across an archive in which texts are actively cross-referencing each other. This approach is essential to the way we apprehend knowledge in the current economy. I define the overarching term "megatext" as a rewritable archive of information and meaning within which the processes of archiving and interpretation are taking place at the same time. I identify particular theoretical concepts leading into my formulation of megatexts and argue the political significance of this approach in terms of Asian American studies and public intellectualism. Then, I define and apply the term "Korean/American" in order to refer to the broad body of work constituting here a "Korean/American megatext." The convergences among the various discourses referenced by megatexts demonstrate how they are useful for bridging different realms. Lastly, I identify the significant constructions of "Korea" in the media as impacting Korean/American ethnic identity formations in order to establish my focus on contemporary Korean/Americanness. I apply this focus and formulate megatexts for each chapter based on individual Korean/American authors and the texts and discourses they reference. Chapter one examines a megatext of Chang-rae Lee's novels, authorship, and popularity. Chapter two expands on the concept of authorship and discusses Don Lee and his collection, Yellow, as evidence of the commodification of author and text. Chapter three examines Korean/American women's bodies in Nora Okja Keller's novels as emblematic of the gendered, neocolonial U.S.-Korea relationship. This dissertation emphasizes the importance of reading the dynamic elements of narratives as a way of contending with the shifting and relational nature of the meanings that accrue to Korean/Americanness.