Postcolonialism

This thesis argues that postcolonial women are doubly oppressed under colonialism and patriarchy. In many instances, women's acts of resistance are overlooked through discursive practices that erroneously portray women as passive victims. In order to correct this misrepresentation of women, Michelle Cliff chronicles women's oppression as well as their numerous acts of resistance in Abeng and No Telephone To Heaven. Cliff, thus, ruptures the colonial and patriarchal myths that render women powerless. Central to this thesis, is the argument that the liminal space is critical for empowerment and resistance. Liminality allows an individual to occupy two diverse worlds creating what Homi K. Bhabha calls a "Third Space." This Third Space offers migrant subjects such as Michelle Cliff a good vantage point from which to observe and record the oppression and resistance of the colonized. The thesis utilizes postcolonial theory to explicate the fragmented and contradictory experience of the colonized.

Multicultural literature has been characterized as primarily a collision between dominant and opposing orders, a binary dynamic manifested in any number of linguistic, cultural, social, and political forms. As valuable as this perspective has been in recent decades, multicultural literature offers more. Multicultural literature can be extended by applying to it the principles of possible-worlds theory, a recent critical approach that has pushed the envelope of literary interpretation to keep pace with other kinds of postmodern fiction. Despite the major headway of this new theory, however, its concepts have been rarely applied to multicultural fiction. Specifically within the Asian-American canon, recent literary works present fascinating and sometimes puzzling ways of referring not amenable to an analysis of East/West oppositional discourses. This thesis will go beyond these clashing discourses and explore the complex fictional and metafictional space in Nora Keller's debut novel Comfort Woman.