Department of English

Capstone Project submitted for English 184.2: Early Ecologies (Professor Anahid Nersessian, Spring 2019).

Capstone Project submitted for English 184.2: Early Ecologies (Professor Anahid Nersessian, Spring 2019).

Capstone Project submitted for English 184.6: Magical Realism (Professor Jenny Sharpe, Winter 2019).

Looking West is a collection of poems that explores the intersection of faith, doubt, and community in the face of grief. The speaker endures a journey of deep self-reflection as they attempt to find a sense of place across a rural Texas landscape and within the urban sprawl of Northern Los Angeles. The poems contemplate loss as it relates to others, loss of self, and loss of security in spiritual spaces as the speaker navigates the throughlines that bind them to their roots. It ultimately attempts to ask, rather than answer: who are we if not where we came from?

In this autofiction novella, a young Chinese and Korean-American girl goes to college with a strong protestant Christian background. Hoping to take more ownership of her faith, she joins Genesis Church, a hip Asian-American church in Los Angeles during her freshman year. She quickly makes friends, finding the community and sense of belonging that she’s always searched for and enters her first relationship with a Chinese-American student involved in the college ministry’s leadership. As this seemingly perfect Christian relationship progresses, her religious boyfriend pressures her sexually, while also blaming her for not preventing this “sin.” After painful experiences a therapist later defines as rapes, she finally leaves her boyfriend. The novella opens after she’s left the relationship; she goes to the church’s pastor and his wife, but their support is flimsy and non-committal. She seeks comfort from her family as well, but her parents are judgmental about her lapsed virginity. Her roommate, a non-believer, becomes her main source of support. The novella follows her recovery and her attempts to integrate the ideas she inherited from her upbringing about virginity, femininity, and Christianity, with the person she’s now becoming.

Press reviews and scholarship have cast Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer primarily as a Vietnam War novel; however, in examining its unnamed narrator’s mixed race and its implications, I offer a reading in which a character’s mixedness is not co-opted to represent something else, but read as deserving of its own analysis and the narrator himself as a self-representative mixed subject. In The Sympathizer, mixedness – what I define as the quality of being multiracial – acts as a mode that enables the unnamed Vietnamese and white narrator to move through physical, narrative, chronological, and embodied liminal spaces, thus embracing the concept of displacement as identity. In doing so, the narrator disrupts binary characterizations of mixed identities, rejects the post-racial idealization of mixed identities, and pushes back against valorized notions of home and wholeness. By demonstrating how the narrator inhabits Trinh T. Minh-ha and Homi K. Bhabha’s “unhomely” liminal spaces, while also moving between and among the boundaries that delineate these spaces, my analysis refutes Sheng-mei Ma’s assertion that mixed Asian characters are converted exclusively and statically to either an Asian or American identity by presenting mixedness as its own fluid category with unique challenges and experiences. Methodologically, I critique binary approaches to race and to literary criticism that aims to settle and parse something as amorphous as mixed identity, and instead invite the nuance and threats to racial hierarchy that unsettled, non-binary racial identities entail.

This chapter analyzes two love triangles involving not only same-sex love, but also liaisons between two men who are a generation apart, and between two women a generation apart. These stories reveal the invasive social gaze on individuals who do not conform to traditional gender codes; the heteronormative pressure that drives gays and lesbians to seek refuge in sham heterosexual unions; and the contrast between the interdependent Chinese ethos that values lasting commitment and the independent US ethos that prioritizes personal fulfillment.

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of  allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.