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Disidentifying with America: Ideas of Development in Post-2000 Asian Immigrant Narratives
Boo, Min Kyung
Boo, Min Kyung
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2025-05
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English
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https://doi.org/10.34944/18c8-t696
Abstract
My dissertation examines post-2000 Asian American narratives of development that foreground immigrant and refugee trajectories shaped by the legacies of U.S. colonialism and militarism. These texts highlight how Asian immigrants’ development negotiates popular national discourses like the “savior narrative,” “rescue narrative,” or the U.S. immigration myth. Such national discourses have problematically reduced Asian immigrants’ telos of development as a process of assimilation and achieving upward mobility by leaving behind their homelands, which are considered “underdeveloped” countries that cannot provide professional and economic opportunities, to the United States, a “developed” country with promises of upward mobility. Erased in such narratives is the United States’ history of imperial violence and political intervention in the immigrants’ home countries that heavily shaped the displacement of the diasporas. Furthermore, the racialization of Asian refugees and diasporas as indebted further obscures the imperial violence that the United States exercised in Asia during the Cold War.
My dissertation proposes that post-2000 immigrant narratives demonstrate the ways in which the national developmental discourses complicate Asian American telos of development, from pursuing national identification to envisioning national disidentification. Through analyses of Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1943) and John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), Elaine Castillo’s America is Not the Heart (2018), Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet (2004), and Grace Cho’s Tastes Like War (2021), I highlight how contemporary Asian immigrant narratives shift away from figuring development as national identification with America. I argue that post-2000 immigrant narratives contend with national narratives, questioning and challenging the dominant assumptions that U.S. immigration is a rational and desirable teleology.
In weaving formal analysis into my close reading of Asian immigrant narratives, my dissertation emphasizes that these texts are literary works that are not just mimetic reflections of writers’ ethnic or familial memories and histories. It demonstrates how these immigrant narratives rework the genre conventions of bildungsroman or memoir to subvert interpretive frameworks that narrowly envision immigrant development as assimilation. These works question traditional assumptions about Asian immigrant development—symbolic identification with America or ethnic assimilation—and normative development.
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