From a Distance of One Hundred and Twenty Years

Theorizing Diasporic Chinese Female Subjectivities in Geling Yan's: The Lost Daughter of Happiness

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4052255
AutoresSally E Mcwilliam, Sally E McWilliams (autor de correspondencia)
Año2005
Volumen6
Número1
Páginas133-160
Fecha de publicación2005-10-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaMeridians (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1536-6936 • E-ISSN: 1547-8424
EditorialDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/mer.2005.6.1.133
OpenAlexW1998850052
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas20

Diasporic Chinese women's literature presents a recurring struggle to integrate the complexities of national and transnational pasts with contemporary manifestations of racial, gender, and sexual politics and histories. Geling Yan's The Lost Daughter of Happiness problematizes the narrative conventions used to depict diasporic Chinese female subjects (2001). x Her examination of female subjectivity interrogates how diasporic Chinese women's narratives cross national, racial, and sexual boundaries. Yan casts her novel as the contestable ground for new feminist textualities and subjectivities of the diasporic Chinese female subject, writing in new ways previously unspoken stories. My analysis of Yan's novel examines the deployment of rescue narratives, the politics of interracial love affairs, and the power of the female gaze in light of the contemporary narrator's selfconscious cynicism about her Chinese heritage and positionality in the United States. Reading about these issues within the novel's metafictional framework compels readers to focus on the contradictions and paradoxes that gird Chinese women's narratives. Yan's text necessitates an investigation into the reconstruction of a feminist literary history and its relation to both the nation-state and current transnational practices of capitalism. In

Aesthetics · Art · Capitalism · Chinese americans · Ethnic group · Happiness · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Anthropology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy