Disorientations: Experimental Form in Asian American Literature

Disorientations: Experimental Form in Asian American Literature explores the relationship between unconventional, experimental, avant-garde, or broadly nonrealist aesthetic form in the major works of three seminal writers of Asian American literature — Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946) and “The Story of a Letter” (1946), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée (1982) — and the role that these works played in the foundation and development of an Asian American literary canon and Asian American studies in general. Focusing on how the aesthetic maneuvers and formal conventions of these works are not only shaped and informed by, but directly shape and inform, their political and social commitments, this dissertation traces how these works in turn shaped and informed the trajectory of the Asian American literary and critical traditions which established themselves by mobilizing them. This dissertation argues that these works seek to create languages for diasporic Asian experiences that were previously unavailable and were interdicted by the political and social conditions and historical violences of European and American imperialism and white supremacist racism which informed and made possible those same diasporic experiences by warping recognizable literary conventions and genres, often realist and⁠/⁠or autobiographical; and in doing so both created a new register which not only registered those histories of violence, but would also provide crucial material through whose deployment Asian American studies and literature would consolidate themselves and their core political commitments and critical vocabulary.