Narrative of Return: Reconfirming American Identity and Home in Lydia Minatoya’s Talking to High Monks in the Snow
0
조회
0
다운로드
2
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
The purpose of this essay is to examine the way in which in Talking to High Monks in the Snow, Lydia Minatoya raises the core issue of ethnic minority's identity crisis, and establishes her sense of home not in Asia but in America. Though not discussed in Asian American literature, Minatoya's text has been considered as non-conventional text which subverts the Japanese American autobiographical tradition. She refuses to depict her and her mother's memory of Japanese American history in terms of reinforcing stereotypical image of Japanese American. Throughout the text, she continues to resist becoming Japanese American defined by ethnicity and nationality. By strategically and relationally placing herself among communities, cultures, and nations, she draws a map of her identity as American in the contexts of others. However, confronting "a sense of rootedness in a particular geographical locale," Minatoya resists becoming a postmodern notion of mobile subject who can subsume a variety of identities with cultural and social memories. She rather reconfirms America as her permanent place and the fatherland in the end, which she needs to embrace ultimately in order to complete the formation of her self-identification. From this perspective, Minatoya who wants to be defined as an American writer in her deep consciousness produces a narrative of return to America from her long journey to Asia after she realizes that she has no problem with achieving the acceptance from her motherland, Japan or the other Asian countries. She, however, needs the acceptance from her fatherland, America where she has long been treated as ethnic other. While she says the acceptance as the explicit reason which she has to return to America, at the deep level of her narrative of return, Minatoya establishes a new subject with selective identity, who can determine her home and identity in the boundary of the United States.
Abstract
The purpose of this essay is to examine the way in which in Talking to High Monks in the Snow, Lydia Minatoya raises the core issue of ethnic minority's identity crisis, and establishes her sense of home not in Asia but in America. Though not discussed in Asian American literature, Minatoya's text has been considered as non-conventional text which subverts the Japanese American autobiographical tradition. She refuses to depict her and her mother's memory of Japanese American history in terms of reinforcing stereotypical image of Japanese American. Throughout the text, she continues to resist becoming Japanese American defined by ethnicity and nationality. By strategically and relationally placing herself among communities, cultures, and nations, she draws a map of her identity as American in the contexts of others. However, confronting "a sense of rootedness in a particular geographical locale," Minatoya resists becoming a postmodern notion of mobile subject who can subsume a variety of identities with cultural and social memories. She rather reconfirms America as her permanent place and the fatherland in the end, which she needs to embrace ultimately in order to complete the formation of her self-identification. From this perspective, Minatoya who wants to be defined as an American writer in her deep consciousness produces a narrative of return to America from her long journey to Asia after she realizes that she has no problem with achieving the acceptance from her motherland, Japan or the other Asian countries. She, however, needs the acceptance from her fatherland, America where she has long been treated as ethnic other. While she says the acceptance as the explicit reason which she has to return to America, at the deep level of her narrative of return, Minatoya establishes a new subject with selective identity, who can determine her home and identity in the boundary of the United States.
참고문헌 (20)
- Bhabha, Homi K., "The Location of Culture" (1994), Routledge
- Chu, Patricia P., "Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America" (2000), Duke UP
- Davis, Rocio G., "Mediating Historical Memory in Asian", American Family Memoirs: K. Connie Knag's Home Was the Land of Morning Calm and Duong Van Mai Elliott's The Sacred Willow, 2007, pp.30(4), 491~511
- Du Bois, W. E. D., "The Souls of Black Folk" (1989), Bantam
- Duncan, Patti, "Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech" (2004), U of Iowa P
- Kellman, Stephen G. Rev, "Of Talking to High Monks in the Snow: An Asian American Odyssey, by Lydia Minatoya", pp.96~ (1992), USA Today
- Kim, Elaine H., "Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context" (1982), Temple UP
- Kondo, Dorinne, "Dissolution and Reconstitution of Self: Implications for Anthropological Epistemology", Cultural Anthropology, 1, pp.74~88 (1986)
- Minatoya, Lydia, "Talking to High Monks in the Snow: An Asian American Odyssey" (1992), Harpers Collins
- Mura, David, "No-No Boys: Re-X-Amining Japanese Americans", New England Review, 15(3), pp.143~165 (1993)
- Rayson, Ann, "Beneath the Mask: Autobiographies of Japanese- American Women", MELUS, 14(1), pp.43~57 (1987)
- Roberson, Susan, ""Introduction" of Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation", pp.1~16 (1998), U of Missouri P
- Sone, Monica, "Nisei Daughter" (1979), U of Washington P
- Spickard, Paul R., "What Must I Be?: Asian Americans and the Questions of Multiethnic Identity", pp.255~269 (2000), Rutgers UP
- Takezawa, Yasuko I., "Children of Inmates: The Effects of the Redress Movement among Third-Generation Japanese Americans in: Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader", pp.299~314 (2000), New York UP
- Uchida, Aki, "Reconstructing Identity: The Autobiographical Self of a Japanese American Woman in Lydia Minatoya’s Talking to High Monks in the Snow", A Journal of Women Studies, 19(1), pp.124~146 (1998)
- Volpp, Leti, "(Mis)Identifying Culture: Asian Women and the ‘Cultural Defense in Asian American Studies: A Reader", pp.391~422 (2000), Rutgers UP
- Wong, Sau-ling C., "Middle-Class Asian American Women in a Global Frame: Refiguring the Statue of Liberty in Divakaruni and Minatoya", MELUS, 29(3), pp.183~210 (2004)
- Yamamoto, Traise, "Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body" (1999), U of California P
- Yogi, Stan, "Japanese American Literature in: An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature", pp.125~155 (1997), Cambridge UP