Bridging Representations of North American Chinese Diaspora with Homi Bhabha

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This dissertation investigates how Wayson Choy and Laurence Yep deploy discursive strategies for increasing Chinese North Americans’ visibility in North America. So far, there has been a tremendous amount of published research on their works, but very few scholars have considered their representations of North American Chinese diaspora through the lens of postcolonial theory. In response to this insufficiency, my dissertation examines their Chinese diasporic writings with Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory and addresses the inseparable link between postcolonial studies and Chinese North American literature. The dissertation argues that the liminal moment of cultural signification—“neither Chinese nor American/Canadian”— foregrounded in the works by Choy and Yep destabilizes the power of North American cultural hegemony and rearticulates the unsettling difference in the narration of the nations of Canada and the United States. This argument is developed in the course of four chapters: Ch

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