(UN)RECONCILED SELVES: AMERICAN BORN CHINESE THROUGH THE LENS OF DU BOISIAN THOUGHT
Mots-clés :
American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang, W.E.B. Du Bois, Identity, Double-consciousnessRésumé
Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel, American Born Chinese, has entered the syllabus of several North American classrooms as a starting point for discussions on racial stereotyping and identity formation. Despite having been compared to how African American authors explore the consequences of negative stereotyping, critics of Yang’s work have directed their attention mostly towards the reality of members from the Asian American community. Yet, this article aims at comprehending how the concepts of “double consciousness” and “two-ness” developed by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) can be used in order to better understand the experience of contemporary Chinese American youths as it has been represented in American Born Chinese. By utilizing Du Bois’s understanding of the psychological impacts of negative stereotyping on his black subjects this work argues that a parallel can be drawn between this African American author’s theory of split consciousness, together with its resulting feeling of otherness, and several narrative elements of Yang’s graphic novel, as well as its tripartite structure. Furthermore, it also examines how both authors present their readers with similar solutions in order for conflicting selves to achieve a state of undivided self-consciousness.Téléchargements
Références
BLACK, M. Fanon and DuBoisian Double Consciousness. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, v. 5, n. 3, p. 393-404, 2007. Available at: scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol5/iss3/36. Accessed 12 Mar. 2018.
BRUCE JR., D. D. W.E.B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness. American Literature, v. 64, n. 2, p. 299-309, 1992. Available at: jstor.org/stable/2927837. Accessed 12 Mar. 2018.
DAVIS, R. G. Childhood and Ethnic Visibility in Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese. Prose Studies, v. 35, n. 1, p. 7-15, 2013. Available at: hdoi.org/10.1080/01440357.2013.781341. Accessed 12 Mar. 2018.
DU BOIS, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
EDWARDS, B. H. Introduction. In: The Souls of Black Folk. By W.E.B. Du Bois. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
FANON, F. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 2008.
GOODING-WILLIAMS, R. In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.
HENRY, P. Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications. Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise, v. 1, n. 3, p. 1-22, 2006. Available at: globalstudies.trinity.duke.edu/wp-content/themes/cgsh/materials/WKO/v1d3_ PHenry.pdf. Accessed 12 Mar. 2018.
LAN, D. The Model Minority between Medical School and Nintendo: Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham’s Level Up. In: Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives. Ed. Monica Chiu. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2015. 69-86.
MIN Z.; YANG S. X. The multifaceted American experiences of the children of Asian immigrants: Lessons for segmented assimilation. Ethnic and Racial Studies, v. 28, n. 6, p. 1119-1152, 2005. Available at: sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/zhou/pubs/Zhou_Xiong_ERS.pdf. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018
NGUYEN, V. T. The Remasculinization of Chinese America: Race, Violence, and the Novel. American Literary History, v. 12, n. 1/2, p. 130-157, 2000. Available at: jstor.org/stable/490245. Accessed 12 Mar. 2018.
OH, S. Laughter against laughter: interrupting racial and gendered stereotypes in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, v. 8, n. 1, p. 20-32, 2017. Available at: doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2016.1233897. Accessed 12 Mar. 2018.
PITTMAN, J. P. Double Consciousness. In: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford University, 2016. Available at: plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/ entries/double-consciousness/. Accessed 12 Mar. 2018.
SARIGIANIDES, S. T. ‘Coerced Loss and Ambivalent Preservation’: Racial Melancholia in American Born Chinese. Educational Theory, v. 67, n. 1, p. 37-49, 2017. Available at: doi.org/10.1111/edth.12224. Accessed 12 Mar. 2018.
TAKAKI, R. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Back Bay Books, 2008.
WANG, J. Between Realism and Genre Fiction: American Born Chinese and Strange Fruit. The Midwest Quarterly, v. 58, n. 2, p. 220-241, 2017. Available at: search.proquest.com/openview/0a131f00400ab6e46351f62f6a968a0d/1.pdf?pqorigsite=gscholar&cbl=41210. Accessed 12 Mar. 2018.
YANG, G. L. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, 2006.
YANG, G. L. Gene Yang on Stereotypes. Interviewed by Mark Siegel. First Second Books, 1 May 2007. Available at: firstsecondbooks.typepad.com/mainblog/2007/05/gene_yang_on_st.html. Accessed 12 Mar. 2018.
