ABSTRACT

Gish Jen’s novel World and Town (2010) questions a liberal-individualist ideal in American society into which migrants and refugees are expected to assimilate. This article draws on trauma theory to explore the ways in which this neoliberal ideal creates connection bias that prevents the witnessing and healing of minority cultural memories. The novel fleshes out the contradictions within a post-9/11 multicultural milieu by depicting a Cambodian American refugee family who paradoxically reinforces trauma and exclusion in order to survive communal apathy and state-sanctioned amnesia. Through an analysis of Jen’s creative mobilization of an independent-interdependent dialectic, I suggest that World and Town proposes a shift of community membership from a “politics of recognition” to an “ethics of witnessing.” While recognition still presumes a hierarchy of belonging, an ethos of bearing witness in Jen’s novel constructs a political subjectivity of obligation, whereby community members become vulnerable to traumatic memories that are beyond cognitive knowledge and abject differences that regenerate national meanings.

摘要

Gish Jen 的小说《世界与城镇》 (2010) 质疑美国社会中移民和难民被期望融入的自由个人主义理想。本文利用创伤理论来探索这种新自由主义理想如何产生联系偏见，从而阻碍少数民族文化记忆的见证和治愈。这部小说通过描绘一个柬埔寨裔美国难民家庭来充实 9/11 后多元文化环境中的矛盾，这个家庭自相矛盾地强化了创伤和排斥，以便在社区冷漠和国家认可的健忘症中生存下来。通过对 Jen 对独立-相互依存辩证法的创造性动员的分析，我建议World and Town提议将社区成员从“承认政治”转变为“见证伦理”。虽然承认仍然假定了归属等级，但 Jen 小说中的见证精神构建了义务的政治主体性，社区成员因此变得容易受到超出认知知识的创伤记忆和重生民族意义的悲惨差异的伤害。