An Invitation to Dialogue: Reworking American History in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men
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This paper examines Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1980 China Men as a historical materialist project to intervene in the teleology of American history. Taking Theodore Roosevelt as the quintessential epitome of the historicist logic, I discuss how he built U.S. national history as a continuous narrative of progress embodied in the white male body. China Men is an effort to resist such a historicist project to gloss over muffled stories of some and legitimize selected stories of others as the national history of seamless progress. It rewrites a U.S. history from the historical materialist perspective by ripping individual stories and particular historical events of the past and juxtaposing them with myths, folklore, media reports, and legal documents. Thereby, it exposes the construction of national history as arbitrary and at the same time re-inscribes Chinese American history. Not assimilated or subsumed into a totality of national telos but, while maintaining its relative autonomy as specific stories with concrete consequences, Chinese America is ultimately sublated to and re-articulates the sum total of American history.
Abstract
This paper examines Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1980 China Men as a historical materialist project to intervene in the teleology of American history. Taking Theodore Roosevelt as the quintessential epitome of the historicist logic, I discuss how he built U.S. national history as a continuous narrative of progress embodied in the white male body. China Men is an effort to resist such a historicist project to gloss over muffled stories of some and legitimize selected stories of others as the national history of seamless progress. It rewrites a U.S. history from the historical materialist perspective by ripping individual stories and particular historical events of the past and juxtaposing them with myths, folklore, media reports, and legal documents. Thereby, it exposes the construction of national history as arbitrary and at the same time re-inscribes Chinese American history. Not assimilated or subsumed into a totality of national telos but, while maintaining its relative autonomy as specific stories with concrete consequences, Chinese America is ultimately sublated to and re-articulates the sum total of American history.
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