"not the story I learned, but ... the story I tell" : (Re)presentation, Repair, and Asian Canadian Women's Writing of the Mid-1990s

Barrieses, Azalea

"not the story I learned, but ... the story I tell" : (Re)presentation, Repair, and Asian Canadian Women's Writing of the Mid-1990s

dc.contributor.advisor	Roy, Wendy	en_US
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Muri, Allison	en_US
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Vargo, Lisa	en_US
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Liu, Yin	en_US
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Downe, Pamela	en_US
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Sugars, Cynthia	en_US
dc.creator	Barrieses, Azalea	en_US
dc.date.accessioned	2015-09-16T12:00:13Z
dc.date.available	2015-09-16T12:00:13Z
dc.date.created	2015-08	en_US
dc.date.issued	2015-09-15	en_US
dc.date.submitted	August 2015	en_US
dc.description.abstract	This dissertation examines selected literary works by Anita Rau Badami, Denise Chong, Hiromi Goto, Larissa Lai, and Kerri Sakamoto, exploring how their stories respond both to the absence of representations of Asian Canadian women in literary discourses of the early twentieth century and to homogenizing assumptions in official histories. My formulation of (re)presentation in the title recognizes the multiplicity and constructedness of these denoted identities and experiences and the self-representations of these writers as a response to this elision and misrepresentation. The term repair borrows from philosopher Hilde Lindemann Nelson’s theorizing of “narrative repair,” which involves telling counterstories, but also is used in psychological contexts as a healing mechanism. An elaboration of both models, as applied in this study, is optimally useful in diasporic contexts as resistance to the elision and/or racist and gendered discursive constructions of Asian Canadian women and as restoration of damaged identities. The texts under study—Tamarind Mem, The Concubine’s Children, Chorus of Mushrooms, When Fox Is a Thousand, and The Electrical Field—were all published in the mid-1990s, after the initial forays into the writing of novels by Asian Canadian authors such as Joy Kogawa (1981) and SKY Lee (1990). My choice of these sister narratives recognizes the family as central to identity construction and intergenerational (mis)understanding and emphasizes the importance of this period’s second-generation explosion of writings by Japanese, Chinese, and Indo Canadian women that paved the way for the current plethora of writings by authors from these cultural groups that contribute significantly to Canadian representations of diasporic identity. This study explores the nuances and pluralisms of the representations of Asian Canadian women. The texts under consideration are cultural autobiographies and matrilineal or sexually transgressive narratives that reinvent the cultural memory of Canadian women of Asian ancestry; produce cultural fusions through the transcreation of oral traditions and simulations of the oral, transcoding of ancestral tongues, and discursive strategies of silence; and address connections between self and place in examinations of Canada, the adopted country, as (un)homely territory. Presenting unhyphenated diasporic female subjects who exceed socially scripted boundaries of gender, sexuality, race, and nationality, in terms of both Canada and the writers’ and protagonists’ ancestral Asian nations, these “acts of narrative insubordination” (Nelson 8) exemplify emancipatory politics and recuperative and revisionary projects. Interrogating questions of (re)presentation and repair from positions of liminality and across gendered, racial, linguistic, and geographical divides, this research contributes to current urgent discussions of identity, transculturation, multiculturalism, and globalization in literary and cultural studies.	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10388/ETD-2015-08-2191	en_US
dc.language.iso	eng	en_US
dc.subject	Asian Canadian	en_US
dc.subject	Asian Canadian Women's Writing	en_US
dc.subject	Identity	en_US
dc.subject	Representation	en_US
dc.subject	Narrative Repair	en_US
dc.subject	Anita Rau Badami	en_US
dc.subject	Denise Chong	en_US
dc.subject	Hiromi Goto	en_US
dc.subject	Larissa Lai	en_US
dc.subject	Kerri Sakamoto	en_US
dc.subject	Tamarind Mem	en_US
dc.subject	The Concubine's Children	en_US
dc.subject	Chorus of Mushrooms	en_US
dc.subject	When Fox is a Thousand	en_US
dc.subject	The Electrical Field	en_US
dc.title	"not the story I learned, but ... the story I tell" : (Re)presentation, Repair, and Asian Canadian Women's Writing of the Mid-1990s	en_US
dc.type.genre	Thesis	en_US
dc.type.material	text	en_US
thesis.degree.department	English	en_US
thesis.degree.discipline	English	en_US
thesis.degree.grantor	University of Saskatchewan	en_US
thesis.degree.level	Doctoral	en_US
thesis.degree.name	Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)	en_US