Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers And The Politics Of Speech

by Patti Duncan

Overview

Tell This Silence by Patti Duncan explores multiple meanings of speech and silence in Asian American women's writings in order to explore relationships among race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. Duncan argues that contemporary definitions of U.S. feminism must be expanded to recognize the ways in which Asian American women have resisted and continue to challenge the various forms of oppression in their lives. There has not yet been adequate discussion of the multiple meanings of silence and speech, especially in relation to activism and social-justice movements in the U.S. In particular, the very notion of silence continues to invoke assumptions of passivity, submissiveness, and avoidance, while speech is equated with action and empowerment.

However, as the writers discussed in Tell This Silence suggest, silence too has multiple meanings especially in contexts like the U.S., where speech has never been a guaranteed right for all citizens. Duncan argues that writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Mitsuye Yamada, Joy Kogawa, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nora Okja Keller, and Anchee Min deploy silence as a means of resistance. Juxtaposing their “unofficial narratives” against other histories—official U.S. histories that have excluded them and American feminist narratives that have stereotyped them or distorted their participation—they argue for recognition of their cultural participation and offer analyses of the intersections among gender, race, nation, and sexuality.

Tell This Silence offers innovative ways to consider Asian American gender politics, feminism, and issues of immigration and language. This exciting new study will be of interest to literary theorists and scholars in women's, American, and Asian American studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587294433
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	05/01/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	276
File size:	364 KB

About the Author

Patti Duncan is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Portland State University, where she specializes in Asian American women's studies, women of color feminist theories, and intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and national belonging.

Read an Excerpt

Tell This Silence Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech
By Patti Duncan
University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2004 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87745-856-2



Chapter One Introduction. The Uses of Silence and the Will to Unsay

By calling this introductory chapter "The Uses of Silence," I invoke Audre Lorde's essay "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism," in which she discusses anger as an appropriate, viable, and useful response to racism. Anger, she writes, when "expressed and translated in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.... [It] is loaded with information and energy" (127). Lorde compares anger to other, less useful responses to racism, such as reactionary defensiveness, hatred, and guilt. She suggests that guilt "is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.... It becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness" (130). Thus, Lorde effectively reclaims an emotion previously regarded as negative, even harmful. She examines the ways in which anger, within specific contexts, is "loaded with information and energy" and, when used as a means of social and personal transformation, can liberate and clarify.

Lorde's analysis of anger in relation to racism also serves to expand and complicate definitions and understandings of both race and racism. Her focus on women's racism links race to gender, suggesting the ways in which such categories of identity are inextricably intertwined and must be examined synchronously. In Tell This Silence, I recognize and acknowledge the many complex ways in which race and gender are structured in our culture, as well as the different forms that racism and sexism enact at various societal levels, from interpersonal interactions to larger sociostructural relationships. Also, I seek to expand the very concept of racism, as contemporary understandings of racism in the United States commonly fail to account for the cultural discrimination faced by Asian Americans, as well as other people of color and immigrants. Upon careful review, however, there seem to be multiple silences at work in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. Such silences are suggestive of the various social and political possibilities and processes inherent to discussions of the critical intersections of categories of identity. Hence, I look to the silences within writings by Asian American women in order to interrogate their meanings to contemporary discourse about the relationships among race, gender, sexuality, and national belonging.

An examination of silence, in relation to Asian American women's experiences in the United States, opens questions regarding history, authenticity, and resistance to subjugation. As a critical reconceptualization and, at times, reclamation of silence, Tell This Silence attempts to reinscribe its potential as a strategy of resistance. I suggest that an exploration of the uses of silence offers new insights into the ways in which silence operates as a form of discourse and as a means of resistance to hegemonic power, particularly the forms of power structuring the lives of contemporary Asian American women. Interrogating and historicizing representations of silence within feminist and postcolonial writings and theories provide one significant site for reconsidering notions of language, translation, memory, and history-processes that remain crucial to political and social-justice agendas. Thus, I analyze the notion of silence within several Asian American women's narratives. I focus on this particular group for numerous reasons, not the least of which are the negative stereotypes (e.g., silence, passivity, deceptiveness, and inscrutability) often associated with women, with women of color in the United States, and with Asian American women in particular.

Along with silence, I also explore the cultural meanings of speech in the United States, often conceptualized as the opposite of silence. In fact the two are not binarily opposed but have most often been understood through such a framework within Western culture. Tell This Silence suggests that both speech and silence must be examined for their implicit meanings, the assumptions that underlie our understandings of them, and the complicated associations they have for and with marginalized groups of people in the United States. To demonstrate these points, I include in this introductory chapter a discussion of the multiple implications of speech and silence in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior.

The Politics of Naming and Terminology

I use the terms "Asian American" and "Asian Pacific American" cautiously and rather self-consciously. While I use these terms interchangeably in some instances, I also recognize the specificity implied by each term. Like Chandra Talpade Mohanty's statements about her decision to use the problematic term "Third World woman," I recognize that while "[this] is the only terminology available to us at the moment," we must continue to question such designations. Mohanty suggests that she employs the term in order to designate a common context of struggle and to link women from various social and geographical locations (52-54). In fact, and most notably, she pushes the term beyond geography to demarcate a space that is social and political. Thus, "Third World," in this context, suggests those women often defined outside of current mainstream notions of feminism-women of "developing" countries, including those of radically disparate regions and economies; women of color in the Western world; and in some cases any and all women who choose to align themselves with "minority" women, who are situated within contexts of struggle and/or who imagine themselves as part of a community committed to exploring the relationships among race, gender, class, sexual identity, and national belonging. Thus, "Third World women" implies a political definition-not an essentialist one. Similarly, Beverly Guy-Sheftall also advocates use of the term "Third World women" rather than or in addition to "women of color" in some contexts. Guy-Sheftall suggests that while problematic, "Third World women" may be more useful in moving out of the binary black/white framework so often implied by the term "women of color" and also situates feminist struggle within a global context.

Other writers debate the political usefulness of terms such as "women of color" and "minority women." No simple exercise in semantics, such debates actually frame the interests and agendas of various social, economic, and political constituencies, highlighting the ways in which language is extremely political, especially for marginalized groups of people. For example, Nancy Naples discusses the political implications, within feminist organizing, of terms such as "Third World," "postcolonial," "international," "global," and "transnational." Underscoring each term are issues surrounding these politics of naming. "Postcolonial," for instance, while "typically applied to nations like India where a former colonial power has been removed ... [may actually] mask continuing colonial relations that shape the lives of people in these nations" (5). Any attempt to apply singular definitions to diverse groups of women in relation to feminist struggle, Naples suggests, requires asking, "Who gets to define issues to be brought to the transnational political stage, who gets to participate in this form of activism, and whose voices are left out of the dialogue?" (8).

I use the term "Asian American" in the broadest sense to refer to individuals of Asian descent living in the United States. While my discussion also includes a work by an Asian Canadian writer, Joy Kogawa, I recognize that doing so, in the words of Laura Hyun Yi Kang, "risks reasserting the hegemony of the United States in claiming the identification of 'American' as a nationality" (2002, 216). However, given that "Asian American" is itself a construction, produced through various sociopolitical transnational processes and diasporic movements, including Western intervention into Asian nations, the inclusion of Kogawa's text enables some consideration of the specific forms racialization of Asians has taken in both the United States and Canada. Many activists in the United States have preferred "Asian American" since the 1960s, when the word "Oriental" was critiqued and then discarded as a derogatory term connoting exoticism and inferiority. Also in the 1960s, the hyphen between "Asian" and "American" was eliminated by some writers and activists in order to affirm Asian Americans' sense of being American by avoiding the inference of split identities and not-quite-American status, as well as stereotypes of conflicted and tragically bifurcated Asian American identities. Other women of color, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, offer critiques of terms for ethnic groups that place ethnicity first, as adjectives, before the noun "American" (1987, 53-64). To Anzaldúa such a practice not only conveys that, for example, "Mexican Americans" are neither Mexican nor American, but when push comes to shove they must identify more as "American" than "Mexican"; to her this is a form of "copping out." Yet other members of ethnic minority groups have suggested that by claiming "American" for ourselves, we assert our status as belonging, and we intervene into preconceived ideas about what "American," after all, means.

"Asian American" as a term comes with its own set of problems. For instance, it masks differences among people of Asian descent based on national origin and national identity, region, class, generation, religion, etc. It seems to imply some sort of unity among all Asian countries, when this is not the case (in fact, there are long and complicated histories of colonization, war, and partitions among and within Asian countries). "Asian American" does not specify immigration and generational differences, though a great deal has been written about, for instance, the Issei, Nisei, and Sansei generations within Japanese American communities. Furthermore, while the project of "claiming America," according to Shu-Mei Shih, was once the hallmark of Asian American identity politics, it has come under scrutiny in recent years by both Asian Americanists and new immigrants, who locate themselves in the spaces between two or more nations (144). Asians and Asian Americans are often conflated, taken to signify two interchangeable groups, thus equating national and racial identifications. However, many first-generation Asians in the United States may not identify themselves as Americans, and, as JeeYeun Lee states, "many people of all generations who originate from nations that have endured colonial subjugation in the past and/or neocolonial relationships in the present, such as the Philippines, reject Americanness: to a certain extent, these people have already been forcibly made 'American' in their own homelands" (116).

Finally, use of the terms "Asian American" and "Asian Pacific American" tends to marginalize certain groups and individuals that, at various historical moments, may or may not fall into this category legally, politically, or culturally. At the same time, the term "Asian American" seems to center other groups. For example, "Asian Pacific American" supposedly denotes those of Chinese, Japanese, Okinawan, Korean, Taiwanese, Filipino, Indian, Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai, Burmese, Cambodian, Laotian, Malaysian, Singaporean, Nepalese, Hmong, native Hawai'ian, Guamanian, and Samoan descent, among others. However, at various historical moments, people of South Asian descent have been considered other than Asian or Asian American, or the term "South Asian" has been conflated with Indian, at the exclusion of "other" South Asians. Pacific Islanders currently face exclusion, marginalization, or simply being engulfed into the classification of Asian American-"swallowed whole and remaining ever invisible among (East) Asian Americans" (Kauanui and Han 377). People of mixed heritage fail to live up to the standard image implied by the term "Asian American." In fact, according to Lisa Lowe, anyone who is not male, heterosexual, middle-class, of East Asian descent, and English-speaking, does not qualify as "Asian American" in the sense that the term is often coded. Similarly, Elaine H. Kim writes that historically, there have not been many ways to be Asian American: "The ideal was male, heterosexual, Chinese or Japanese American and English-speaking. The center of Chinese America was San Francisco or New York Chinatown, and the heart of Japanese America was in Hawaii or along Highway 99.... Asian American history was about railroads, 'bachelor societies,' and internment" (1995, 12-13).

Asian Americans, then, have been homogenized by mainstream American culture and by those who comprise the so-called norm within Asian American communities. Members of dominant groups within the United States who have argued for the exclusion of Asians from this nation have viewed Asians as an expendable workforce and as interchangeable ("they all look alike"). Some members of dominant groups within Asian America (e.g., East Asians, men, the affluent and middle-class, the English-speaking), in their attempts to assimilate into Western capitalist paradigms of "success," have also homogenized Asian Americans, ignoring and erasing differences in gender, class, language, ethnicity, and even region and history. It is this homogenization of Asian Americans that in some cases contributes to the oppression and cultural discrimination Asian Americans face in the United States. Lowe suggests that we acknowledge the ways in which cultural definitions must change along with social and economic realities. She writes, "The boundaries and definitions of Asian American culture are continually shifting and being contested from pressures both 'inside' and 'outside' the Asian-origin community" (1996, 66). She urges us to recognize the ways in which Asian America constitutes heterogeneous, hybrid, and multiple social locations.

I employ the term "Asian American," then, with full awareness of its problematic political and social implications. As a strategic term and group identification, it lends itself to the illusion of unity, masking differences that, some argue, threaten the already precarious position of Asians in the United States. As Tell This Silence suggests, however, our recognition of such differences, with careful consideration of the historical, social, and political trajectories of the distinct experiences of Asian Americans, will ultimately strengthen Asian American communities.

The Transformation of Silence

The notion of silence has long been a trope in liberation and social-justice movements in the United States, including feminist, lesbian/gay/bisexual/ transgender, and civil rights and antiracist struggles and movements of people of color. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminist and African American, Asian and Pacific Islander American, Native American, and Latino/a and Chicano/a activist leaders have advocated to their constituencies the importance of "finding a voice," of "speaking out" against oppression and injustice, and of moving away from the silences that may imply consent to subjugation, as well as to the maintenance of dominant power. The liberatory rhetoric of U.S. gay and lesbian-and queer-movements have also utilized notions of "speaking out" and "breaking silence" by linking those acts with the process of coming out. Similarly, AIDS activists proclaim "silence = death" and demand that we "break the silence" imposed upon our lives. This rhetoric, its common appeal to "speaking out," "finding a voice," and "breaking silence," places its liberatory aspirations precisely within the very discourses of speech, suggesting that speech itself represents liberation, while in opposition to speech, silence represents both the precondition and the very foundations of oppression.

Invisibility, loss, absence, repression, oppression, the unspoken, the unknown-these concepts continue to be equated with silence, while visibility, gain, presence, liberation, and "truth" are equated with the act of speech itself. As such, silence becomes antithetical to liberatory agendas and practices in the realm of political activism and in fields of scholarship. In these contexts, certain Eurocentric premises regarding social norms about speech and silence prevail. Free speech is supposedly one of the few protected rights of citizens. However, as Kyo Maclear suggests, the idea that all speech is "free" is open to critique. She notes the frequent operations of censorship and oppression, and she questions the notion that democratic participation and representation are ensured through "speech." This speech is located in a Western philosophical tradition that posits, in the words of Maclear, "speech = agency = freedom" (8). Thus, subjectivity is defined in opposition to silence. Concurrently, speech is conceived to be a necessary condition for subjectivity.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface Acknowledgments 1. ntroduction 2. What Makes an American 3. White Sound and Silences from Stone 4. Cartographies of Silence 5. Silence and Public Discourse 6. Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index