The Psyche of Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Queering Memory and Reproduction in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea

Christopher B. Patterson ； Y-Dang Troeung

《Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies》 42卷1期 (2016/03) Pp. 73-98

https://doi.org/10.6240/concentric.lit.2016.42.1.04

並列摘要

This paper explores how Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl (2002) and Changrae Lee’s novel On Such a Full Sea (2014) use speculative tropes to unsettle the “post-racial” futures imagined through the tethering of neoliberalism and multiculturalism. By combining speculative elements with tropes of queer reproduction, both novelists forgo the racial identities that make individuals recognizable to neoliberal multiculturalism. Instead, these texts focus on how the bodies, talents, stories, and memories of racialized subjects become appropriated and reconstructed for the purpose of maintaining a multi-racial upper class. In this essay, we consider how these Asian diasporic speculative texts enact their critique of neoliberal multiculturalism and its instrumentalization of ethnic/diasporic memory through the deployment of speculative tropes of (queer) reproduction.

並列關鍵字

speculative fiction ； Asian diaspora ； neoliberalism ； multiculturalism ； queer reproduction ； Larissa Lai ； Chang-rae Lee

參考文獻

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Chow, Rey(2002).The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism.New York:Columbia UP.

Corrigan, Maureen. “Chang-rae Lee Stretches for Dystopic Drama, but Doesn't Quite Reach.” NPR Books. NPR, 14 Jan. 2014. 30 June 2015..

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