• American Studies
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.211-229
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• 2021

Toni Morrison's A Mercy (2008) describes Jacob Vaark, an early settler from England, and his grand house that symbolizes the American Dream in the 1680s. The source of his success is colonialism and slavery, as revealed by four female characters-a white Englishwoman Rebekka and three non-white women Florens, Sorrow, and Lina. Analyzing how the novel compares the women's experiences with nature and natural objects, this paper draws on ecofeminism as a theoretical frame of analysis to examine the novel's hitherto overlooked representations of naturalized women and feminized nature. The paper analyzes how the novel represents oppressions and exploitations of the four women in relation to nature that is similarly appropriated and developed by European men. The paper maintains that the novel does not represent these "naturalized" women as powerless and passive but portrays them as growing characters who resist patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1311-1337
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• 2010

This paper deals with one of the hottest debates in the history of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) since its inception in the late 1960s. In 1998 at Hawai'i, the AAAS awarded Lois-Ann Yamanaka its Fiction Award for her novel Blu's Hanging, only to have this award protested. The point at issue was the inappropriate representation of Filipino American characters called "Human Rats" in the novel. This event divided the association into two groups: one criticizing the novel for the problematic portrayal of Filipinos in colonial Hawai'i, and the other defending it from the criticism in the name of aesthetic freedom. Such a "crisis of representation" in Asian American identity reflects on the ways in which local Hawaiians are positioned in the complicate power dynamic between oppositional Hawaiian identity and cosmopolitan diasporic identity within the larger framework of Asian American pan-ethnic identity. The controversial event triggered the eruption of Asian Americans' anxiety over the identity-bounded nation of Asian America where intra-racial classism and conflict have been at play, which are primary themes of Blu's Hanging. This paper shows how Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging becomes so disturbing a work to prevent the hegemonic formality of Asian America identity from being fully dogmatic. Ultimately, it contradicts the political unconscious of the reading public and unmasked its false consciousness by engendering a "free subjective intervention" in the ideological reality of colonial Hawai'i.