Karen Tei Yamashita and Magical Realism: Re-Membering Community, Undoing Borders

Abstract

Yamashita’s use of mythic verism in Tropic of Orange and a reimagined doppelgänger trope in I Hotel depicts the ir/real nature of the taxonomy of identity and of Asian America and other minority groups being constituted in and beyond the mainstream or conventional understanding of the idea of America and of the identity of the US nation-state as being built upon discursive technologies of amnesia and misinterpellation of the subject of US history and its Other.