Asian American Studies Commons^™

Silence, Speech, And Solidarity In Contemporary Asian American Literature, Amanda Gersten

Senior Projects Spring 2015

This project seeks to overturn popular misconceptions about Asian American literature by situating it in a political context while also attending to complexities of language and form. Chapter One explores the significance of silence in the work of Toshio Mori, whose Yokohama, California (1949) was the first book of short stories published by a Japanese American in the United States, ultimately finding that Mori’s work resists the notion of silence as indicative of “model minority” assimilation. Chapter Two uses Fredric Jameson's problematic theory of Third World “national allegory” as a compelling framework through which to criticize ongoing concerns about the …