Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation examines works by Richard Wright, Chang-rae Lee and Junot Diaz, as well as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather films, and how they theorize the trope of the “ethnic dictator.” On the most basic level, this project conceives of ethnic American writers as engaged in a dialogue with international political strongmen, and aims to reveal the discursive imbrication between two different kinds of “literary dictators”: first, the literary representations of political leaders, both as historical personages and narrative inventions; and second, the figure of the writer as one who dictates a literary narrative, and in doing so exercises his own form of authoritarian power. More specifically, I explore how the dictator figure emerges as an important mediating trope for these writers to work through questions of ethnic identity, transnationalism, diasporic consciousness, historical memory and political subject-formation. To this end, this project partakes in the ongoing transnational turn in American literary studies, while emphasizing a conception of the “transnational” that focuses on political exchanges between nation states, and the way these exchanges have often been brokered, mediated, and rendered legible by charismatic strongmen. Throughout this study, I highlight three related hermeneutic functions of the ethnic dictator trope. The first is as a site of a transnational or diasporic consciousness, in which the dictator comes to embody an “authentic” connection to an imagined homeland, as well as the relationship between this homeland and other national entities, such as the United States. The second is as a linchpin and container for heterogeneous discourses, which parallels the dictator’s power to impose cohesion and unity upon their polities, and the diverse social and political groupings therein. The third, finally, has to do with the question of genre, and how the dictator figure is both rendered legible through the deployment of generic frames, while at the same time signaling a certain generic instability inherent in these texts. Ultimately, my study gestures toward the affinities between dictatorship and genre, as active shapers and constrainers of knowledge, and the way this relationship comes to inflect literary theorizations of ethnicity.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2015)
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Citation
Liao, David Chang Yi,
"Dictators: Ethnic American Narrative and the Strongman Genre"
(2015).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z00V8B53
