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lost in the margins of society, forever longing for a home far away, is a central theme explored in chapter 6, “The City as a ‘Contact Zone’: Meena Alexander’s Manhattan Music.” For Alexander, the “radical migrancy” that marks the experience of “creatures of postcoloniality” who border nation-states and linguistic boundaries can compel “an exhilarating art, an art that takes as its birthright both dislocation and the radical challenge of reconceiving American space” (Shock of Arrival 161, 158). I borrow the concept of “contact zone” from Mary Louise Pratt as employed in her book Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, which calls critical attention to the “interactive dimensions” of those encounters and “how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other” within “radically asymmetrical relations of power” (7). In Manhattan Music the city is a protean “contact zone” constituted by people from around the world and by the diasporic communities and their connections to other parts of the world. Alexander re-represents the city as “American space” by allowing her female Asian Indian characters to inhabit the city through border crossings, transformative encounters, subversive memories, and artistic as well as social activism. Drawing on postcolonial and feminist theories, I highlight the relationship between the raced, gendered body and the metropolitan space in the subject formation of South Asian women immigrants and diasporans, whose actual and symbolic crossings of streets in New York City mobilize a transformative process of both the postcolonial female subject and the American city.

      Further pursuing Asian American writers’ enactment of the politics of space in the era of economic restructuring and globalization, chapter 8, “Mapping the Global City and ‘the Other Scene’ of Globalization: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange,” examines the effects of Yamashita’s magical realist strategies for mapping the cityscape of Los Angeles on a global scale, especially the city’s relationship to the global South. Maps and mapping, the late geographer J. B. Harley convincingly argued, are not simply scientific depictions of geography. They are epistemological, political, and pedagogical tools for claiming territories and for legitimizing plunder, conquest, and divisions between peoples and nations (281).The major characters in Tropic of Orange offer alternative interpretations of the official map and insist on inscribing power relations along with layers of histories of the city, the Americas, and other parts of the world, as well as the everyday experience of the displaced, the marginalized, and the homeless in Los Angeles as a global city intricately bound up with the global South. By mapping the global South—the “other scene” of globalization (Spivak’s phrase in “Globalicities” 74)—in the global city, Yamashita registers not only large-scale social injustice but also powerful resistance uncontainable by spatial segregation or border control. The cityscape of L.A., then, manifests not just the “spatialization of global power projects”; it is a “new frontier zone” for a new politics of resistance (Sassen, “Reading the City” 15, 16). Employing magical realism to disrupt linearity of time and to dislodge space from bounded territories, Tropic of Orange marks a new departure in Asian American literature in both thematic concerns and narrative strategies, compelling a new mode of interdisciplinary approach, which my study seeks to advance by engaging with discourses and debates on globalization, as well as Asian American criticism.

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      “THE WOMAN ABOUT TOWN”

      Transgressing Raced and Gendered Boundaries in Sui Sin Far’s Writings

      Every story is a travel story—a spatial practice.

      For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics.

      —MICHEL DE CERTEAU

      [B]oth the external and internal design and layout of the City symbolize male power and authority and men’s legitimate occupation of these spaces.

      —LINDA MCDOWELL

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