Undead identities: Asian American literature and the Gothic

Using the Gothic as an aesthetical enterprise to encourage a productive engagement with Asian American literature, this essay will discuss a specific text, Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone, to foreground the dilemma of belonging experienced by diasporic peoples in the United States. My consideration is guided by the fact that there are many observable confluences found in both genres with regard to themes and tropes. Subscribing Asian American narratives to the way Gothic conventions are appreciated and theorized can reveal the ideological impasse that inevitably vexes the nation’s foundational myths: that is, the incompatibility between racism and democracy that has shaped much of, and continues to shape, American history.