ENTANGLED TESTIMONIES: TECHNOLOGIES OF SUBJECTIVITY IN ASIAN AMERICAN WOMEN'S WRITING

• Main Author: Ro, Mee-Ju
• Other Authors: Wong, Sunn Shelley, Sakai, Naoki, Caruth, Cathy
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Women's studies; Asian American Literature; Testimony; Translation Theory; Transpacific studies; Autobiography; Asian American studies; Trauma Theory; American literature; polar bear
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1813/59611; http://dissertations.umi.com/cornellgrad:11088; https://doi.org/10.7298/X49Z933Q

Foucault writes, "Western man has become a confessing animal" where "one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell" (The History of Sexuality 59). And he argues that it is through this act of "self-examination" that we come to form the "basic certainties of consciousness" (59). Confession, a species of testimony, is a technology of subjectivity that has undergone a particular modern turn constituted as a mode of autonomous self-expression. I contend that this modern turn is analogous with the relatively recent rise of the form of quotation and reported speech. Whether it is about myself, an event, or someone else, testimony always employs some configuration of reported speech, most importantly reported "inner" speech. Consequently, accurate testimony becomes a matter of finding the closest and most approximate calibration to this inner truth. I argue that Asian American women’s writing, particularly when it tries to bear witness to a traumatic history, demands an account of testimony that arises from within a relation of address, rather than from within an individual’s singular experience. From Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE, to Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear, I read primarily Asian American texts that are transpacific in scope. These texts are narrated by multiple generations of women who must contend with the dislocation of migration and a history of violence. Entangled Testimonies insists that testimony and its relationship to historical redress must necessarily come from the point of view of difference with regard to hybridity, translation, race, and women’s writing. Drawing on the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia, Entangled Testimonies puts forward a theory of testimony that is "entangled, shot through with shared thoughts" and "the alien words of others." In doing so, it disrupts the Euro-centric concept of the individual and the schema of proof that is at the heart of modern forms ...