| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,400,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,400,000)
Fiscal Year 1998: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000)
Fiscal Year 1997: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
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| Research Abstract |
This project comprises three sections. The first chapter deals with the name problems that confronted immigrants mainly from eastern Europe in the early part of this century, and demonstrates how they handled the issue by looking at Louis Adamic's What's Your Name (1942). In quite fundamental ways the social history of Pre-World War II immigrants implies today' cultural conflicts over language and education.
The second section focuses on the difficulties Japanese immigrants had about their names in the first half of the 20th century. Issie farmers and merchants had to borrow the names of American citizens to maintain their families in America, even if they felt themselves America was their home. The Nisei, who were Americans by birth, were expected by their parents to be bridges between East and West. Typically most had two names, a Japanese and an American one. This, however, seemed to some of them to mean that their lives as well as their identities were split between the two. Mariko
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(for instance) dared to change her name to Mary by a gloating desire for a 100% American, but her aspirations were easily thwarted by the mass incarceration of all West Coast Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Mary renamed herself Mariko in despair.
Here in this section I also discuss what has become of the Mariko (later Mary) now by reading some works written by today's comparatively young Japanese American authors such as Yoji Yamaguchi, Julie Shigekuni, Noriko Sawada, Kayo Hatta, and so on. The Mariko image, which refers basically to ethnicity, has its triple yield in claiming, as Hatta does, an inheritance of family pride ; throwing a sense of family into doubt (in Shigekuni's novel) and especially, in Sawada's case, bringing up politics of naming in the family ; and opening new channels of ethnicity in the manner of Shakespearean festival plays (in Yamaguchi's novel).
The third chapter covers the developments in the subject of self-naming in Bharati Mukherjee's first four novels. The heroines in her early novels had difficulties giving a new name to themselves because they felt torn somewhere between an Indian and an American. In her third novel, however, Mukherjee creates an illegal immigrant, who is named "Jane" by white males in order to sanitize the foreigners but manages to escape the imperialism as a no-name woman. Namelessness, in the forth novel, is bound together with the transnational vitality of American society in which the author puts unquestioning trust. Less
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