UC Riverside

Considering the double meaning of the word “domestic” as referring to both home and nation, this study examines how the imagined space of “home” for multiracial Asian American fictional characters reflects and produces contested meanings of being American. This project asks how multiracial characters’ search for spaces of belonging within and outside the U.S. nation-state uncovers disavowed histories of racialization, settler colonialism, and U.S. imperialism. Drawing on theorization and research from three academic fields—critical mixed race studies, U.S. colonialism and critical militarization studies, and spatial studies, I analyze eight late 20th and early 21st century Asian American fictional narratives that feature mixed race protagonists. By tracing the co-constitutive formation between racial and spatial imaginations, I approach works of realist fiction as cultural discourses whereby narrative spaces simultaneously describe and produce their material counterparts. This study demonstrates that although the post-Civil Rights multiracial movement has privileged heteronormative familial love to achieve social legibility for multiracial people, the domestic fractures and tensions in these contemporary narratives point to the limitations and contradictions of the familial/national domestic imaginary for mixed race Asian Americans and make visible the legacies of repressed histories of settler colonialism and imperialism. The chapters follow a spatial trajectory, where the multiracial characters’ pursuit of belonging begins in the space of the home and the American heartland (Chapter One), continues in the road fantasy and in the streets of coastal urban centers (Chapter Two), returns to an overseas “homeland” (Chapter Three), and finally, constructs an imagined multiracial “Promised Land” in Hawaiʻi (Chapter Four). By challenging and reimagining domestic spaces and relationships, these narratives interrogate the dominant cultural production of a cohesive national identity that alternatively excludes and domesticates racial others and instead proposes alternate modes of kinship and belonging.