Looking Up: Reading for Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Asian American Literature

Abstract

This dissertation examines how contemporary Asian American literature engages settler colonialism not through direct representation of Indigenous characters or moments of Asian-Indigenous encounter, but through formal and narrative strategies that illuminate the structural logics of settler colonialism. While much of Asian American literary scholarship explores settler colonialism through explicit references to or representations of such interactions, this project instead asks we might read for its presence in the absence of such representations. I argue that literary form offers a crucial site to understand how Asian American literature engages the entangled logics of settler colonialism and racism. To this end, I read four contemporary Asian American novels for their formal and narrative strategies: the compromised status of truth and memory in the confessional form in The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen in Chapter One; the narrative cartography produced by a polyvocal crowd of narrators in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange in Chapter Two; and the questionable unity of first-person plural narrators in Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea and Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao in Chapter Three. Taking temporality as its organizing heuristic, the dissertation interrogates the dominant narrative arc through with Asian American history is typically plotted: a linear progression from migrant exclusion, to multicultural inclusion, to model minority assimilation. I read these novels as they relate to constructions of linear time—of past, to present, to future—through critical Asian American, Native, Black, and queer temporal interventions that disrupt such normative teleologies, and foreground the entangled histories of migration, racialization, and settler violence. By doing so, these I hope this project helps us expand the dominant formal and temporal frames and reading practices through which Asian American literature and subjectivity has been understood, and situate it within a broader critique of U.S. settler colonialism.