Through an analysis of two cultural works of California agriculture between the Great Depression and contemporary neoliberalism, this essay proposes that American agrarianism brings with it a new set of social, historical, and racial questions about US citizenship and environmental rights. Building on the new scholarship of environmental justice and critical race studies, the first part of the essay analyzes how John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) was both motivated and structured by the desire to possess the land to claim US citizenship: regenerating white masculinity through acquiring the land based on the racial logics of the notion of private property while making “invisible subjects” (e.g. people of color and immigrants) who are not suitable for the land and environmental stewardship. The second part of the essay turns to Mexican American writer Helena Maria Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) as a crucial environmental justice text that writes back against the proliferation of US environmental racism and infrastructural violence. Viramontes’s narrative, I argue, complicates and keeps questioning about our understanding of race, environment, citizenship, and human health in an effort to help us see the invisible links between the exploitation of migrant farm workers and the uneven distribution of environmental risks in the food system. For both Steinbeck and Viramontes, literature functions as a way to challenge social and environmental injustice, though it also shows their somewhat self-contradictory and problematic understanding of environmental citizenship.

This paper aims to examine how Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s writing was a part of the Care of the Self and how she practiced Parrhêsia through her writings. Michel Foucault’s definition of the Care of the Self is to constantly take care of yourself and reflect on yourself to identify who you are and grow into the right entity. He said that writing is one of the most important practices for the Care of the Self. Gilman’s writing exemplifies the Care of the Self, which has helped her to grow and become aware of who she is as a result of continuous introspection and self-discipline practice. Gilman’s writing was not only used for her growth, but also for her Parrhêsia. She claims to promote human rights for women of the time who were oppressed and in unequal positions. Etymologically, Parrhêsia is an act of telling the truth without fear despite being criticized by the public. Gilman’s Parrhêsia is that women should stand up as independent entities through practice of the Care of the Self and that women’s domestic work should be given fair value for their economic independence. In her novel What Diantha Did, she assigns economic value to housework, which was considered only a natural duty for women at the time, and says that in order to improve women’s rights, women need to be awaken to know themselves and able to find their own abilities.

This paper considers an Asian American renarration of the Little House legacy, examining how the Asian American readership engages with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s frontier narrative and its predominantly white and racially demarcated prairie. The Asian American presence has long been marginalized in the Midwest, and also being unseen in relation to Wilder’s literary legacy. While the trope of invisibility has haunted the Asian American psyche in historical, social, and literary terms, the Midwestern Asian American child readers of the Little House books live their invisibility within and outside of the text. Their implicit hope for solidarity and sense of belonging is betrayed when they realize Wilder’s prairie is a territory granted to the children of white settlers. Bich Minh Nguyen grew up as an avid Wilder reader in the Midwest, and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and Pioneer Girl are her retellings of and intertextual responses to Wilder’s legacy. Stealing Buddha’s Dinner vividly discloses the repressed anxiety experienced by a young Asian American Midwestern reader, revealing ambivalent emotions of intimacy, betrayal, and denial toward the Little House books. Pioneer Girl, on the other hand, makes a more conscious claim of identity and belonging, claiming the Midwest and America by way of appropriating Wilder’s narrative. Nguyen’s works evince that the Little House books’ non-interpellation of Asian Americans deters neither their engagement with nor their claiming of Asian American space within the books’ legacy. What surfaces is the undeniable presence they establish within the American classic canon’s genealogy.

This paper focuses on the role of ‘playing’ in the formation of Huck’s character, and how Huck’s role as a character and narrator observe the constructedness of class and whiteness in the antebellum South. In the first section, I examine the role of pretend play in the relationship between Huck and Tom and how it organizes the hierarchy among the children and emulates the social stratification of race and class. While Tom remains firmly in the fabric of that hierarchy, Huck is propelled into a series of role-playing that enables him to become an observer of the adult world. In the next section, I look into Huck’s ambiguous whiteness in relation to his unstable social status. In the last section, I examine Huck’s role as a spectator and how this role invites the readers into the minstrelsy of white manhood. By focusing on the male characters, I read the novel in the context of Jacksonian minstrelsy culture that used the black(ened) bodies to confirm a shared whiteness that became the base of racial supremacy.

This paper explores hybrid Canadian in-betweens in contemporary Asian Canadian fiction by focusing on Wayson Choy (1939-2019) and his first novel The Jade Peony (1995). Choy himself is a cross-cultural writer who was born in Vancouver and spent his childhood in the city’s large Chinatown area. And Choy’s generation of Canadian-born Chinese resisted choosing one side of their double identities as Chinese Canadian subjects, but sought out negotiable possibilities for the hybrid integration of two distinctive positions. In The Jade Peony, Choy’s aim is thus to convey how three Canadian-born children of his generation―Jook-Liang, Jung-Sum, and Sek-Lung―negotiate to integrate contradictory subject positions in between the Canadian way and the Chinese way in the process of their construction of hybrid subjectivity. Moreover, Choy’s generation lived through the hard times of the 1930s and 40s amid the historical events of the Great Depression and the Second Sino-Japanese War, in addition to the racist discrimination that resulted from the Chinese Exclusions Act. Through the three Chinese Canadians’ retrospective first-person narrative of their childhood, organized in a coherent chronological manner from 1933 to 1941, Choy thus offers Chinese Canadian history from a different angle. However, even though the geopolitical and cultural territory in which the three narrators’ lives are interwoven is the same, their stories present different aspects of identity formation and distinctive historiography. This paper examines how the three Chinese Canadian subjects construct their unique cross-cultural subjectivity and revive the same historiography from different viewpoints.