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Full-Text Articles in Asian American Studies
Wages Of Resistance: A Consideration Of Time In Jessica Hagedorn’S Dogeaters, Laura A. Wright
Wages Of Resistance: A Consideration Of Time In Jessica Hagedorn’S Dogeaters, Laura A. Wright
Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Using the formal elements of Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn offers a pointed critique of class. Bringing Karl Marx’s discussion of time from Capital into conversation with Gèrard Genette’s narratological essay “Order, Duration and Frequency” I argue that Hagedorn’s depiction of time deliberately undermines the systems of power in the novel. Drawing particularly on Genette’s conceptualization of duration and frequency, I examine Hagedorn’s depictions of men and women at work, specifically the characters of Romeo Rosales and Trinidad Gamboa. Romeo and Trinidad are seldom mentioned in criticism of Hagedorn’s text, but these characters demonstrate Hagedorn’s attention to the working-class and serve …
Rehistoricizing Differently, Differently: American Literary Globalism And Disruptions Of Neo-Colonial Discourse In Tropic Of Orange And Dogeaters, Patrick S. Lawrence
Rehistoricizing Differently, Differently: American Literary Globalism And Disruptions Of Neo-Colonial Discourse In Tropic Of Orange And Dogeaters, Patrick S. Lawrence
Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Through a comparative reading of two important transnational Asian American texts, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, I argue that multiplicity of narration may, but does not always, resist the imposition of culturally dominant aesthetic modes, especially historical and nationalist narratives and multiculturalism. While Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange delegates narrative power to seven characters, it ultimately stages an ambiguous clash of discourses with a multiculturalist historicizing voice that is limited by its own contradictory impulses to control and containment. The novel dialogizes its excessive tendencies by scripting plural-but-discrete identities. In contrast, Jessica …