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Winona Landis_Dissertation_2018.pdf (3.07 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Illustrating Empire: Race, Gender, and Visuality in Contemporary Asian American Literary Culture

Landis, Winona L
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7484-4981
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1532619991050315

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, English.
From Lisa Lowe’s groundbreaking Immigrant Acts (1996) to more recent work such as Jodi Kim’s Ends of Empire (2010), many leading Asian American literary and cultural studies scholars have provided transnational analytics to critically comprehend racial formation in the making of U.S. empire. Most recently, scholars like Camilla Fojas and Victor Bascara specifically call attention to the multiple and overlooked sites of U.S. empire in Asia and the Pacific, from Hawai’i to the Philippines. My dissertation builds upon and advances this body of scholarship by centering visuality as an important lens through which to analyze the construction of race in U.S. empire-making in relation to Asia and the Pacific. I specifically explore the dynamics between the textual and the visual: on the one hand, how literary texts engage with visuality as racial technology; on the other hand, how visual forms, such as graphic narratives, engage the dynamics between race and empire in ways that complicate conventional textual representation. In this way, my dissertation will analyze empire and transnationality as illustrated—both literally and figuratively—by Asian American and diasporic writers and cultural producers. The textual and visual literary works that I investigate share the common project of problematizing and redefining American and Asian American identity as well as uncovering the neoimperial cultural forces attendant to this identity. However, I approach them not simply as texts that depict or represent, but rather actively construct various racial subjectivities in an “America” that is broadly conceived. These varied texts rely on the visual as a technique to give renewed clarity to the perceptions and effects of race in global U.S. empire. my project is divided into two parts: first, interrogate the construction of empire in Asian/American novels that consciously evoke the visual as a technique for illuminating racialization; second, I demonstrate the ways in which graphic narratives compel us to see the functions of race in imperial Asian/America in new ways. By incorporating the graphic form and visual technique into textual representation, these literary texts prompt readers to confront the how visuality centrally mediates the material conditions of neoimperial subject formation in Asia and America.
Yu-Fang Cho (Committee Chair)
Anita Mannur (Committee Member)
Theresa Kulbaga (Committee Member)
Linh Dich (Committee Member)
Mark McKinney (Committee Member)
201 p.
American Literature; Asian American Studies; Comparative

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Landis, W. L. (2018). Illustrating Empire: Race, Gender, and Visuality in Contemporary Asian American Literary Culture [Doctoral dissertation, Miami University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1532619991050315

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Landis, Winona. Illustrating Empire: Race, Gender, and Visuality in Contemporary Asian American Literary Culture. 2018. Miami University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1532619991050315.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Landis, Winona. "Illustrating Empire: Race, Gender, and Visuality in Contemporary Asian American Literary Culture." Doctoral dissertation, Miami University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1532619991050315

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

miami1532619991050315
206
© 2018, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Miami University and OhioLINK.