Passages: Writing Diasporic Identity in the Literature of Early Twentieth-Century Japanese America.

Japanese Literature;East Asian Languages and Cultures;Humanities;Asian Languages & Cultures

Vassil, Kristina S.Zwicker, Jonathan E. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Japanese Literature;    East Asian Languages and Cultures;    Humanities;    Asian Languages & Cultures;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/84564/kvassil_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation aims to disrupt established notions of Asian Studies and Asian American Studies by focusing on four early twentieth-century Japanese language texts that do not fit neatly into either field. Using the concept of diasporic literature—where stories are set in other locations while revealing a continuing dialogue with the ;;homeland”—I examine Hozaka Kiichi’s Wagahai no mitaru Amerika (Amerika as I see it), Okina Kyûin’s theory and practice of iminchi bungei (immigrant land literature), Nagai Kafû’s Amerika monogatari (American Stories) and Maedakô Hiroichirô’s Santô senkyaku (Third-class passengers). This framework allows work written by canonical ;;Japanese” authors like Kafû and Maedakô to be put into a productive dialogue with that of ;;Japanese American” authors like Okina and Hozaka. Through readings that deeply engage early twentieth-century American and Japanese historical and ideological contexts, I bring out the nuanced understanding of Japanese immigrant communities contained in these texts, one that underscores cleavages based on class, status, language, and region. Investigations of the four texts also show how the literary products of diasporic populations incisively critique (and sometimes celebrate) the spaces that they inhabit and how they engage the possibility of flexible identities.In Chapter One, I introduce the work of Hozaka Kiichi and reveal how it manifests a diasporic trajectory of return by attempting to intensify the connections between American Japanese residents and the Japanese homeland through ideological discourse, rhetorical storytelling and paratextual representations. Chapter Two discusses Okina Kyûin’s concept of iminchi bungei, a pioneering mode of literary production incorporating both American and Japanese political and religious discourses, which strove to rise above, but was inevitably grounded in, concepts of the nation. In Chapter Three, on Nagai Kafû’s Amerika monogatari, I analyze the writers’ experimentation with narrative voice and embedded narratives to present accounts of a ;;Japan” and an ;;America” fragmented by racial, class, status and regional differences. Chapter Four discusses Maedakô Hiroichirô’s early proletarian piece Santô senkyaku and shows how boredom, nostalgia and aesthetic appropriations of the nation unify the third-class passenger collective.