The Question of Colonial Subjectivity in Neoliberal Hawaii in Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging
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This paper examines ways in which Asian Hawaiians’ flexible assimilation into the pan-ethnic identity of Asian America feasibly comes true in Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging. In the novel, the Ogata children are ultimately co-opted for the neoliberal constitution of American citizenship while leading a wretched life without Mama on the remote Hawaiian island of Molokai. Mama sacrificed herself for her children, who believe her specter watches over them; Mama’s absence reifies the ideals of motherhood through her spectrality. This novel juxtaposes the children’s coming-of-age story as such with the ontological transformation of their ideological subjectivity from abject melancholic minority to neoliberal American citizenry. As being typical in a bildungsroman, the children, whose lives were a priori impoverished, empty, and melancholic, embark on a journey to realize that their colonial subjection originates from their parents’ displacement from a society informed by mainland norms of health and ideal citizenship. The process of their coming of age, as a result, parallels that of their moral, ethical, and political assimilation to neoliberal modes of life envisioned by postmodern America, where gender, racial, and sexual minorities are examined in terms of ideological, as well as biological, orientations. In this regard, this paper shows how the “given” stereotype of Asian Americans as a model minority paradoxically turns into an ontological gap in the symbolic entity of ideal motherhood as it evokes the traumatic memory of colonial abjection in neoliberal Hawaii. This paper critically analyzes ontological dualities of Asian American characters as such in the novel whose abject subjectivity, I argue, works to reveal the truth about the antinomic reality of Hawaii that has materialized in U.S. colonialism.
Abstract
This paper examines ways in which Asian Hawaiians’ flexible assimilation into the pan-ethnic identity of Asian America feasibly comes true in Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging. In the novel, the Ogata children are ultimately co-opted for the neoliberal constitution of American citizenship while leading a wretched life without Mama on the remote Hawaiian island of Molokai. Mama sacrificed herself for her children, who believe her specter watches over them; Mama’s absence reifies the ideals of motherhood through her spectrality. This novel juxtaposes the children’s coming-of-age story as such with the ontological transformation of their ideological subjectivity from abject melancholic minority to neoliberal American citizenry. As being typical in a bildungsroman, the children, whose lives were a priori impoverished, empty, and melancholic, embark on a journey to realize that their colonial subjection originates from their parents’ displacement from a society informed by mainland norms of health and ideal citizenship. The process of their coming of age, as a result, parallels that of their moral, ethical, and political assimilation to neoliberal modes of life envisioned by postmodern America, where gender, racial, and sexual minorities are examined in terms of ideological, as well as biological, orientations. In this regard, this paper shows how the “given” stereotype of Asian Americans as a model minority paradoxically turns into an ontological gap in the symbolic entity of ideal motherhood as it evokes the traumatic memory of colonial abjection in neoliberal Hawaii. This paper critically analyzes ontological dualities of Asian American characters as such in the novel whose abject subjectivity, I argue, works to reveal the truth about the antinomic reality of Hawaii that has materialized in U.S. colonialism.
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