Articulating Desire: Power, Identity, and Recognition in Modern Okinawan Literature
| dc.contributor.advisor | DiNitto, Rachel | |
| dc.contributor.author | Wang, Xiaoyu | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-01-09T22:41:35Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-01-09T22:41:35Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-01-09 | |
| dc.description.abstract | My dissertation analyzes four Okinawan literary works to explore how desire and the struggle for recognition, as formulated by Hegel, unfold within the Okinawan context. Through examining the various manifestations of the Okinawan characters’ desire, my dissertation investigates what is ultimately desired by Okinawans as colonized individuals, and how this desire reveals a subjective domain of colonial deprivation that goes beyond political and material dispossession. The four stories, I maintain, reveal how colonial domination reproduces itself through a vicious cycle that feeds on the colonized subject’s desire to be seen and recognized for their human validity and value. This psychological mechanism of colonialism keeps producing a false sense of inferiority and dependence among the colonized, which in turn perpetuates the hierarchical power structure of colonialism. In the meantime, however, Okinawan subjects negotiate for themselves recognition they seek and reap certain benefits from the process, even if this recognition turns out to be deceptive and detrimental to their quest for true autonomy. The four Okinawan texts, I argue, question the nature of recognition that Okinawan subjects pursue under the colonial condition and indicate how self-alienation as well as loss of autonomy occur during the pursuit of such illusory recognition. In addition, I contend that these works depict a complex and nuanced image of Okinawans, which prompts a reconsideration of the relationship between Okinawa and its colonizers in terms of intimacy and collusion to go beyond the simplistic binary of resistance and oppression. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29140 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | Okinawan literature | en_US |
| dc.subject | Okinawan studies | en_US |
| dc.subject | postcolonial studies | en_US |
| dc.title | Articulating Desire: Power, Identity, and Recognition in Modern Okinawan Literature | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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