Transnarrative [electronic resource] : giving form to diversity, community, and migration in Asian American and Latina/o literature
Keywords: English.

This study shows how the short story cycle and related forms powerfully model key challenges for contemporary Asian Americans and Latina/os. The parallel struggles of these two groups to encompass diversity within unified coalitions, give voice to communities in flux, and map transnational migrations strain the capacities of narrative representation. Asian American and Latina/o writers meet this strain with innovative developments of the story cycle, a genre of linked stories with roots in American regionalism. But as this overlooked genre becomes increasingly prevalent in contemporary American literature, we lack frameworks for theorizing it. I address this gap with the concept "transnarrative, " a form defined by the relations between and beyond individual stories in a federated network of stories. Exemplified by story cycles but also applicable to fragmented, multi-plot novels, transnarrative describes a strategy of sustaining formal tensions. Transnarrative texts unite different stories while maintaining their differences, link stories while marking the borders between them, and call for attention to divergent scales of narrative relations—within a story, between stories, and across the whole work. It is these constitutive tensions, I argue, that make the form so generative. They model central social tensions for Asian Americans and Latina/os, groups negotiating unity and heterogeneity, blurring and bound by borders, spanning scales from the local to the global. This study advances the nascent comparative scholarship on Asian American and Latina/o literatures by analyzing their mutual development of a socially engaged form. I examine story cycles by Junot Diaz, Aimee Phan, and Rishi Reddi, and re-frame works by Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Salvador Plascencia in transnarrative terms, showing the aesthetic and political stakes of their forms. Transnarrative strategies flourish where efforts to represent complex minority communities are in tension with the dominant discourses that frame them. I examine four such conflicts. Chapter 1 addresses the discursive pressure of racial stereotypes. Synthesizing social psychology with narrative theory, I theorize the formal mechanisms of stereotyping and show how the competing narrative perspectives in Rishi Reddi's Karma (2007) denaturalize the characterizations stereotypes produce. Chapter 2 investigates how diverse communities might be represented against the grain of homogenizing racial stereotypes. Karma and Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005) use transnarrative techniques that destabilize narrative hierarchies of major/minor, center/periphery, narrator/narrated. These techniques create unsettled community portraits that resist stereotyping's fixed representations. Chapter 3 examines ethnic feminist texts that bring transnarrative multiplicity to the individualist genre of the bildungsroman. I read Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) and Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1984) as transnarrative texts staging tensions between the protagonist's diachronic development and synchronic dilations toward other figures in the community whose stories cannot progress. This tension expresses the contradictions between the narrative of individual mobility and the structural barriers that frame Asian Americans and Latinas/os as collective incursions on the U.S. social fabric. Chapter 4 shows how transnarrative texts meet the challenge of developing forms that can give shape to the transnational relations of Asian American and Latina/o populations. The transnarrative strategies of Junot Diaz's Drown (1996) and Aimee Phan's We Should Never Meet (2004) break open ideologies of American immigration to encompass the transnational routes and circuits of U.S. empire that shape many Asian American and Latina/o migrations.