Out of place: Asian North America in transnational borderlands.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Out of Place explores Asian American and Asian Canadian cultural responses to the racial, gender, and sexual ideologies embedded in icons of white settler nationalism in Canada and the US. The transnational icons I examine include the transcontinental railroad, the North American landscape, and the national museum. My analysis of these "transnational nationalisms" is mediated through a multimedia archive that features work by Richard Fung, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jin-me Yoon, Tseng Kwong Chi, Paul Wong, and Maya Lin. I argue that these works expose and undermine the transnational logics embedded in iconic sites of nationalism through strategies of disidentification. By setting Asian North American cultural forms in dialogue with iconic nationalisms, my dissertation attempts to reconfigure the symbolic terrains of white settler nationalism by calling attention to the historically repressed "borderlands" embedded in them, generative places of meaning shaped by Asian North Americans.
I situate this project at the interdisciplinary crossroads of American studies, Asian American studies, and ethnic studies. By drawing attention to parallel social and cultural patterns in Canada and the US, my project attempts to upset the discourse of American exceptionalism by pointing to the interdependence of Canadian and US settler nationalisms. I employ an Asian North American critical framework to expose the transnational features of white settler nationalism, and suggest that the historical similarity of Asian labor recruitment and exploitation, anti-Asian immigration policy, and widespread anti-Asian sentiment in Canada and the US are constitutive rather than derivative features of white settler nationalism. This focus on transnational intersections is influenced in particular by Latina/o border scholars' attempts to decenter the US by emphasizing hemispheric convergences and intersections that impact and shape US culture and society. In addition, my project's attention to Asian Canadian social contexts and cultural formations is an attempt to make specific interventions in the field of Asian American studies, whose long-time emphasis on transnationalism I argue is structurally constrained by an east-west migratory orientation that occludes a north-south analytic axis. Granted that recent Asian American scholarship has begun to expand the field's scope to include the examination of Asian diasporas elsewhere in the Americas, this work has mostly constituted "the Americas" as south of the US-Mexico border and in the Caribbean, which similarly obstructs a view of the large Asian population in Canada. Finally, in keeping with the comparative focus of ethnic studies, my project emphasizes connections between Asian American and Asian Canadians as well as across racial groups in order to highlight the intersecting dynamics of race, gender, and sexual oppression.