Stephen Hong Sohn

Inscrutable Belongings

Queer Asian North American Fiction

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Stephen Hong Sohn is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 336
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. Juli 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 157mm x 28mm
• Gewicht: 635g
• ISBN-13: 9781503604018
• ISBN-10: 1503604012
• Artikelnr.: 48862394

Autorenporträt

Stephen Hong Sohn is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Tactical Diversions: Toward Queer Asian North American Formalisms
chapter abstract
The first chapter of Inscrutable Belongings explores queer racial
formalisms. This chapter articulates three formal and thematic patterns
that are variations of tactical diversions. This phrasing is employed
because these patterns move away from the author's autobiographically
imbued fictional double-a queer Asian North American-to explore other
discursive viewpoints, characters, and social contexts.
2Narrative Endurance: Queer Asian North American Storytellers, Survival
Plots and Inscrutable Belongings
chapter abstract
This chapter more fully engages the key terms of the project, defining the
survival plot, outlining the pivotal importance of inscrutable belongings,
and establishing how these alternative social formations enable the queer
Asian North American storyteller to endure. The latter half of the chapter
engages in a sustained analysis of Russell Leong's short story
"Camouflage," which comes from Phoenix Eyes & Other Stories.
3Inscrutable Belongings in Pathology: Infectious Genealogies in Alexander
Chee's Edinburgh
chapter abstract
The third chapter primarily involves a storyteller named Fee who recounts a
harrowing tale in which he-along with numerous other young boys-is molested
by a choir director. While many of his fellow choirboys commit suicide, the
narrator manages to reach adulthood. However, existing under the weight of
these traumas, Fee finds himself struggling to work through his troubled
past. To assuage these feelings, Fee constructs connections to metaphorical
progenitors, allowing him to reframe the sexual abuse he endured as a
preteen and to reconstitute notions of family and kinship through the logic
of a community of individuals who have survived an outbreak. The chapter in
addition investigates the ways in which the novel critically links earlier
pandemics to the AIDS/HIV crises in the 1980s. Acknowledging these
infectious genealogies enables Fee to disengage from his own participation
in abusive intergenerational relationships.
4Inscrutable Belongings in Cinema: Filmic Lineages in Noël Alumit's Letters
to Montgomery Clift
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 considers the metaphorical ancestries and alternative social
formations developed by a storyteller named Bong. He spends much of his
time mooning over Hollywood movie stars, especially Montgomery Clift. In
this sense, this chapter explores the novel's source of spectral haunting
by moving forward into the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. The chapter
further considers how the protoqueer Asian North American boy employs his
imagination to deal with childhood traumas. The narrator recounts the
centrality of Clift as part of an inscrutable belonging that helps restore
order in a chaotic and dangerous period in which he is abused by a family
member and left abandoned. Eventually he is adopted, allowing him a chance
to foster lasting attachments, but these changes also come with others:
Bong's relationship to Clift alters, and the nature of such social
affinities must evolve for him to emerge as the survival plot's heroic
center.
5Inscrutable Belongings in Hunting: Interracial Surrogacies in Nina
Revoyr's Wingshooters
chapter abstract
The specters of the bubonic plague victim and Montgomery Clift remain
palpable in Chapter 5, in which the narrator, Michelle, obsessively returns
to a period in her youth during which an African American couple, Mr. and
Mrs. Garrett, moves to Deerhorn, her hometown, which is a bucolic but
segregated midwestern location during the 1970s. A period of heightened
racial tensions ensues during which Mrs. Garrett is targeted and then
murdered by a townsperson. This moment is traumatic because the
storyteller-as-young-girl had imagined the possibility of an inscrutable
belonging based on the bonds she had forged with Mr. and Mrs. Garrett. The
novel reveals the need to reconceptualize her life through "interracial
surrogacies," a phrase that calls attention to the desire for this
protagonist to construct a makeshift family, however ephemeral and
unlikely, in a racially homogenous agrarian setting.
6Inscrutable Belongings in Bondage: Degenerate Descendants in Lydia Kwa's
Pulse
chapter abstract
The final chapter takes us to Singapore, where the storyteller, Natalie,
grapples with the suicide of a close friend's son. Whereas earlier chapters
focus on marginalized subjects who act as metaphorical progenitors, Chapter
6 shows how Natalie reconfigures her relationships through healing and
alternative therapies. These therapeutic approaches are necessary to heal
her past traumas, which come to light after she acknowledges the unexpected
parallel she shares with the suicide victim. In this case, the ghost that
haunts this chapter belongs not to someone who died long ago but to a
figure who was born after her and comes from a later generation. The
storyteller comes to embrace this phantom through their collective status
as "degenerate descendants" of the postcolonial nation. The novel's
Singaporean setting elucidates the transnational stakes in my critique, as
these two characters function to critique national ideologies that promote
technological progress and ethnoracial factionalism.
Coda
chapter abstract
The coda sums up the project, establishing the pressing need to recognize
queer Asian North American lives and associated social formations.
Introduction: Imagining Queer Asian North American Lives
chapter abstract
The Introduction establishes the key terms, methodologies, and central
archives of the project. Inscrutable Belongings involves extended readings
of queer Asian North American fictions, focusing on first-person
storytellers who manage to endure to their respective narrative
conclusions. Their harrowing journeys, called "survival plots," are enabled
by a coterie of individuals who are biologically unrelated to the
storyteller and who together denote an "inscrutable belonging."