Browsing by Subject "Alienation"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Reimagining Fathers and Sons: Race, Labor, Alienation, and Asian American Drama
    (2021-06) Hyeon, Youngbin
    Abstract “Reimagining Fathers and Sons: Race, Labor, Alienation, and Asian American Drama” analyzes how works of Asian American drama illuminate conflicted father-son relationships, labor, and states of alienation. Dramatic works by Asian American writers from the 1970s to the 2010s present key examples of the intersection of race and labor and the possibilities of father-son reconciliation. I look beyond previous scholarly approaches to Asian American literature and drama that focus only on the language and culture differences within families or explain the conflict between parent and child as an inevitable culture clash between different generations. This culture-oriented approach fails to consider how attitudes towards work affect the changing demographics and social expectations of Asian America. I argue instead that that these conflicts are symptomatic of U.S. race ideologies that dictate the nature of Asian American working lives and alienation that excludes Asian Americans from more fulfilling forms of labor (what Marx called the “life of the species”). Borrowing from Marxist theories, my dissertation argues that Asian Americans have been exposed to capitalistic and racialized self-alienation from their earliest histories in the U.S., and they still continue to experience it in the contemporary world. I also contend that this Asian American self-alienation informs many dramas of father-son conflict. In these intergenerational plays, the legacy of alienation and alienating work is both inherited and resisted, giving rise to serious and often violent events. Chapter One illuminates how Asian American father-son conflict is intertwined with the history of labor. I examine the historical origins of Asian stereotypes such as the “Perpetual Foreigners” and “Yellow Peril,” labor-based stereotypes about Asian Americans that have been constantly reproduced in American popular culture. These representations reinforce the self-alienation of Asian Americans by confining them into particular social roles. In this context, I analyze Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die (1988). This play presents two Asian American actors who have differing views on how the professional actor might take responsibility as a representational laborer. The play illustrates how agreeing to play a stereotype not only brings about one’s self-alienation, but also help to popularize stereotypical images in culture and media, which in turn affect new generations. Chapter Two focuses on the alienation of Asian American men through their social roles in everyday life. Specifically, I illuminate how they are alienated from their masculinity by having to take on labor that defines them as emasculated. Frank Chin’s two plays, The Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and The Year of the Dragon (1974), show how such gendered and racialized forms of work are accepted by father characters but resisted by their sons. Their defiance of their fatherly models signify a larger challenge against white America and how older immigrant generations have played into racial and ideological hierarchies. This chapter expands upon Chin’s concepts of the “real and the fake” in which he directed younger generation Asian Americans towards defying the dutiful acceptance of oppressive labor. Chapter Three examines the “model minority” myth as another form of alienation that is formative to destructive Asian American father-son relationships. I argue that this myth, which pictures Asian Americans as hard-working, uncomplaining, and family-oriented contributors to the American economy, works as a form of colonial mimicry and a method of preserving white control over Asian Americans’ upward mobility and social status. This myth was thus founded upon the presumption of compliance with racist, capitalist, and heteronormative regimes. In Chay Yew’s Wonderland (1999) and Julia Cho’s Durango (2006), older generations cope with the consequences and lack of self-fulfillment, while younger generations negotiate their autonomy. Both generations wrestle with compliance to work and heteronormative family structures. These plays show that even while a father’s specific job is not passed down to his son, the son still winds up inheriting the anxieties caused by these compulsory forms of compliance so foundational to the father’s mindset. Chapter Four questions the ways that the racialized and gendered binaries of labor are maintained and challenged in the new century. If the binary of alienating labor and non-alienating labor is itself an arbitrary distinction, how can the cycle of alienating labor can be overcome? Julia Cho’s Aubergine (2016) provides an answer, suggesting that the cycle can be broken only with the deconstruction of the dichotomous views of work and home. In this chapter, I firstly analyze how culinary labor has been racialized, gendered, and undervalued for Asian Americans, and then move on to examine how Cho restores the original meaning of the labor of cooking. Aubergine portrays a son reconciling with his dying father through cooking as an act of love; Cho turns the father-son conflict caused by labor into a father-son reconciliation enabled by the value of work. By examining the simultaneous recuperation of working lives and father-son relationships, I illuminate how Asian Americans’ understanding of labor, alienation, and family may have evolved since the days of Frank Chin. I end with an epilogue that discusses how several other examples—Aasif Mandvi’s 1998 play Sakina’s Restaurant, Lloyd Suh’s 2015 play, Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, and award-winning 2020 film Minari—show the continued preoccupation of Asian American playwrights and filmmakers with these themes.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Writing beyond Redress: Slavery and the Work of Literature
    (2019-07) Gildersleeve, Courtney
    Writing beyond Redress: Slavery and the Work of Literature is a comparative study of literary works by Afro-Caribbean writers which illuminate the entanglements of slavery, imperialism, and imprisonment. Spanning a period from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, the project traces in literary writing a dialectic of confinement and emancipation in the long fight against the system of slavery and its attendant ideologies. Each chapter focuses on a primary text that foregrounds either a specific site of confinement during slavery, or an instantiation of its afterlife: the prison (The Memoir of General Toussaint Louverture, by Louverture himself), the sugar plantation (Autobiografía de un esclavo, Juan Francisco Manzano), the isolated peasant village (Gouverneurs de la rosée, Jacques Roumain), and the immigration detention center (Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat). Calling us to rethink the labor involved in the act of writing and the stakes—including physical risk—of speaking from within and against systems of oppression, these texts illuminate the inhibitions of speech and activity that slavery and the institutions that arose in its aftermath were designed to maintain. Confronting, too, the often dissimulating uses of language by the dominant society, these texts reimagine the potency of the written word to combat social wrongs and to forge other possible forms of social being. While writing alone cannot redress the damages of slavery, at the same time, writing must be claimed for the ongoing work of emancipation.