Racialized English(es): On Asian/American and Latino/a discourses of language.
详细信息
- 作者：Hseu ; Jane Willy.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：2007
- 导师：Rowe, John Carlos
- 毕业院校：University of California
- 专业：American Studies.;Literature, American.
- ISBN：9780549150367
- CBH：3273857
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：10082541
- Pages：200
文摘
This dissertation examines language, race, and national identity in relation to Asian/Americans and Latino/as in the US from the 1980s to the early twenty-first century. Numerous language controversies pertaining to Asian/Americans and Latino/as, such as the English Only movement and the debate over Proposition 227, garnered media headlines during this period. In chapter one, I analyze political and journalistic texts and argue that the ideology of monolingual nationalism equates Standard US English, whiteness, and middle-class values with US national identity and marginalizes racial, ethnic, and linguistic minorities.;Next, I examine the work of five Asian/American and Latino/a writers and artists and the ways in which they affirm, contest, revise, and/or re-imagine dominant ideologies of language, race, and nation. Richard Rodriguez's autobiography, Hunger of Memory, upholds the ideology of monolingual nationalism in his conception of the relationship of English and Spanish to the US public and private spheres, while his later nonfiction writings offer a qualified affirmation of linguistic pluralism. A novel obsessed with language and nativity, Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker vacillates between conventional and innovative definitions of the "native" and "non-native speaker." Native Speaker also fluctuates between the idea of the performativity of racial, ethnic, and linguistic identity and a view of these characteristics as essentialist and innate.;Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's performance piece, Aveugle Voix (Blind Voice), and her multigeneric work, DICTEE, exhibit an aesthetic method of displacement that plays with the dissonances and resonances among different genres, media, and forms of communication, such as the visual, verbal, and oral, in order to promote a multiplicity of meanings for the audience. DICTEE also critiques the intersecting hierarchies of power related to language, race, colonialism, gender, and religion. Several performances and writings by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena foreground the oral and aural aspects of language. These aspects are crucial for understanding forms of language discrimination that are related to accent, pronunciation, and the sound of "foreign" languages in the US. Gomez-Pena's anti-essentialist conception of the border also gives us a productive theoretical model with which to understand language and border culture.