Name: Long Le-Khac

Title: Minor Specters: Inter-Vocality, Minor Characters, and Transnational Ethics in Asian-American Short Story Cycles

Abstract: This paper explores the distinctly trans-national poetics and ethics that have arisen in recent Asian-American short story cycles. Writers like Rishi Reddi, Mary Yukari Waters, and Jhumpa Lahiri focus on asymmetric experiences of mobility within Asian-American/Asian-Pacific communities. I argue that these writers respond to the challenges of representing this asymmetry with a new narrative inter-vocality, that is, the meanings of these stories reside in the interplay and interstices between multiple voices that range across differences of generation, gender, race, class, culture, and nation. I build on the work of Rocio Davis and Alex Woloch to develop a theory of their formal innovations. First, the multiple perspectives of these collections trace a complex picture of mobility: those forced to move and those who move willingly, the attractions of cosmopolitanism and the anxieties of destabilized cultural identities. By rewriting characters from multiple perspectives, these stories refuse any totalizing viewpoints in these debates. But more importantly, the inter-vocal poetics of these stories aims to train readers in a trans-national ethics. Juxtaposing stories where minor characters remain resolutely other with stories where the narrator adopts their perspectives, these writers foreground the tension between the fullness of a character’s psyche and the compression of the minor position. This transforms minor characters into specters whose untold stories haunt the margins of each story, gradually leading readers to think beyond the limits of the given perspective and recognize the claims of the Other. For writers in minor positions, the stakes of such a strategy are obviously high.