The work of the Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita has, starting in the 1990s and continuing into the present day, sought to map the manifold forms of interconnectedness between the Americas on one side of the Pacific Ocean and Asia on the other. Across fictional and non-fictional text, the central concern of her body of work is the pluralistic complexity of different human and non-human constellations and intersections crossing the Pacific. In fact, her texts can and must be read as attempting to develop a conceptual framework that is adequate to the pluralistic existence within and across the region. To clearly articulate this framework is the first of the two goals of this project.
This endeavor takes its methodology from Bruno Latour’s magnum opus, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Though Latour’s own study is centered around giving a full philosophical account of the pluralistic ontology of those whom he calls the Moders, the conceptual architecture of the Inquiry, which is to say the ways of identifying individual modes of existence, is highly productive when transferred to Yamashita’s transpacifics. Careful readings of her texts make it possible to articulate individual modes specific to the transpacific as well as the many crossings of two or more modes, each engendering a diverse range of existents. Put another way and paralleling Latour, the aim here is to develop a pluralistic ontological account of the transpacific.
The second part of the project consists of testing the utility of this framework against other contemporary accounts of the transpacific, both fictional and scholarly. Here, recent writings and films by Asian American artists such as Chang-Rae Lee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and K-Ming Chang along with the academic writings of Arif Dirlik, Yunte Huang, and Lisa Yoneyama will be read through Yamashita’s transpacific ontology. The aim of this second part is to both demonstrate the utility of the interpretative framework developed in the first part and to also suggest possible clarifications and amendments through dialogue with other imaginings of the transpacific.
Supervisor: Professor Dr Roman Bartosch