Asian American Memory Narratives and Panethnic Identity Crises:Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Lee’s A Gesture Life
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Memory serves as an essential element that constitutes identity. Maintaining a secure archive of memories, therefore, is important for an individual’s successful identity formation. However, international immigrants such as Asian Americans encounter hardships while developing their own memory narratives, largely because of their marginal status within society. This paper executes a comparative analysis between two Asian American novels that consist of immigrant memory narratives: Carlos Bulosan’s autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart (1946) and Chang-rae Lee’s novel A Gesture Life (1999). Both novels commonly portray the protagonists’ difficulty in preserving their memory narratives, suggesting a potential panethnic common ground that can bring together Asian Americans of various ethnic backgrounds. Taking today’s post-Covid new normality into consideration, this paper contemplates how healthy formation of memory narratives will ultimately benefit societies in this era of increased social conflicts and racial tensions.
Abstract
Memory serves as an essential element that constitutes identity. Maintaining a secure archive of memories, therefore, is important for an individual’s successful identity formation. However, international immigrants such as Asian Americans encounter hardships while developing their own memory narratives, largely because of their marginal status within society. This paper executes a comparative analysis between two Asian American novels that consist of immigrant memory narratives: Carlos Bulosan’s autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart (1946) and Chang-rae Lee’s novel A Gesture Life (1999). Both novels commonly portray the protagonists’ difficulty in preserving their memory narratives, suggesting a potential panethnic common ground that can bring together Asian Americans of various ethnic backgrounds. Taking today’s post-Covid new normality into consideration, this paper contemplates how healthy formation of memory narratives will ultimately benefit societies in this era of increased social conflicts and racial tensions.
참고문헌 (18)
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