Warrior, Cannibal, and Monkey

In Kingston’s Liminal World

Abstract

My paper has been divided into three parts: Part I, “Silence and Voice,” deals with a silence-voicing pattern of The Woman Warrior, in which many conflicts arise from various woman warriors who are like their Chinese ancestress Fa Mu Lan, a woman who tries to break through the barrier of patriarchal society. In Part II, “Cannibal Feasts,” I consider that Freudian cannibal analyses will be beneficial to the interpretations of the images of cannibal ghosts and corpses in Kingston’s books China Men and Tripmaster Monkey. The collaboration of cannibals and ghosts reinforces the possibility of the liminal space and could be interpreted as “ the metonymy of presence” (in Bhabha’s term) for the colonial mimicry that is functioned to cross the borderline. Methodologically, Part II, thus, is served as a bridge to connect Kingston’s two memoirs and her first novel Tripmaster Monkey. Finally, the Part III, “Trickster Monkey and His Community,” elaborates the character of trickster monkey as a figure for the ethnic subject demonstrating an affirmation of difference and resistance. Yet the strategy of resistance is not a Hegelian oppositional relationship between the slave and the master, but something that is very close to the colonial mimicry in Homi Bhabha’s sense. The mimic man Wittman Ah Sing is more like the Afro-American signifying monkey who lives in the margins of discourse and who challenges the dominant culture by providing the multiple performative voicing[1].

Key words: mimicry, luminality, silence/voice, the cannibal, resistance

Source:

“In the Shadows of Empires”:

The 2^nd International Conference on Asian American and Asian British Literatures 

Date: November 28-29, 2008

Location: Taipei, Taiwan

Organizer: Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica

Please send your paper abstract (not exceeding 300 words) and brief CV (one paragraph identifying your name, institutional affiliation, areas of interests, and contact info, and a list of your representative publications) to Andy Wang (wchimin@sinica.edu.tw) by April 30, 2008.  Decisions on acceptance will be announced by May 31, 2008. 

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[1] Henry Louis Gates uses the figure of the signifying monkey to explain the double-crossing of African-American literature. See both “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and Signifying Monkey,” Critical Inquiry (1983): 685-723. Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford UP, 1988).