The exilic sensibility, arising out of postcolonial conditions and a growing transnational consciousness, informs many modem Asian and Asian-American literatures and films. While such "liberatory" concepts as hybridity, heterogeneity, and transnationality have destabilized notions of essentialized and nationalized subjects and their relations to the geographical spaces they occupy, certain "predicaments" have arisen out of the spaces such theories have carved out for the subject. The four papers in this panel will address various dimensions of these predicaments. Su-ching Huang's "Exiles at Home: Mapping the Eurasian Identity in Diana Chang's Frontiers of Love" examines the complications of identity search in conjunction with the presence of international forces in Asian American writer Diana Chang's novel, Frontiers of Love (1956). Reading Shanghai as Mary L. Pratt's "contact zone" and Homi Bhabha's "third space", this paper attempts a racial/national mapping of the metropolitan city with its colonial legacy and tries to understand the identificatory predicaments faced by the Eurasian characters in the novel. Betsy Huang's "Ethnitopia, Ethnophobia, and the Ambivalence of Maxine Hong Kingston" looks at Kingston's most recent book, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) and the landscape of San Francisco as a utopic wonderland of hybrid identities as well as a dystopic bedlam of a dizzying array of identificatory possibilities. In such a landscape, Wittman Ah Sing is both the native and the exile, and this "double consciousness" bespeaks Kingston's ultimately anti-nationalist and anti-nativist stance and her continual struggle with the predicaments underlying the processes of identity formation in America. Ping Fu's "Reformulating Exilic Paradox: Discursive Power Production in Bujian Busan" examines, via Benedict Anderson's concept of "long distance nationalism," how geographical change brought on by immigration not only produces the dislocation and fragmentation of power, culture, and identity, but also broadens the immigrants' visions of their cultural identity in a global context. The contradictory effects of such a dislocation, depicted in the film Bujian Busan, prove that constructing subjectivity in an exile is a multi-purposed political and cultural practice and power production, which is accomplished at the price of transformation of exilers and their worlds from physical geography to discursive/imaginative human geography. And finally, Chungmin Maria Tu's "A Postcolonial/Postmodern Reconstruction of Love, Trauma, and Femininity in Jasmine and Obasan" explores Bharati Mukherjee's and Joy Kogawa's treatment of personal trauma within the larger context of cultural displacement, and uncovers the ways in which the narrators undergo a continual process of self-creation and self-empowering. Via Kristeva's notion of "semiotic chora," Deleuze's idea of "becoming imperceptible," and Bhabha's "otherness within identity," Tu presents a textual analysis of Jasmine's philosophy of letting go and Naomi's releasing of unconscious dreams by recovering the hidden sources of the counterbalancing flows of self-destruction and self-empowering. The powerfulness of these flows makes the transgression of the in-between boundary possible and make the crossing the very key to the construction of female identity. Together, these papers will bring to the fore for further analyses the predicaments that underpin positivistic or optimistic accounts of transnational subject formations.

Contact: Ping Fu, Dept. of Comparative Literature, University of Colorado-Boulder; (303) 604-1727; pfu@ucsu.colorado.edu