{"id":8708,"date":"2010-09-03T16:51:56","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T16:51:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=8708"},"modified":"2016-11-02T17:58:19","modified_gmt":"2016-11-02T17:58:19","slug":"interrogating-identity-construction-bodies-versus-community-in-cynthia-kadohata%e2%80%99s-in-the-heart-of-the-valley-of-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=8708","title":{"rendered":"Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata\u2019s In the Heart of the Valley of Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata\u2019s In the Heart of the Valley of Love<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies<\/a>
\nVolume 1 (2010)
\npages 61-69<\/p>\n

Nicole Myoshi Rabin<\/a><\/strong>, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
\nEmerson College, Boston. Massachusetts<\/em><\/p>\n

In an interview for the journal MELUS<\/em>, Hsiu-chuan Lee claims that Cynthia Kadohata<\/a> suggests her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love<\/a><\/em> does not directly take \u201cany specific ethnicity as its central concern,\u201d nor deal explicitly with the \u201cidentity issue\u201d (165, 179).\u00a0 Despite these assertions by the author, In the Heart of the Valley of Love<\/em> is mainly taught at the university level in Asian American Literature courses.\u00a0 While Kadohata\u2019s novel has been established within this specific canon of Asian American Literature, her novel deals with issues that resonate among all racial groups. This paper considers the ways in which Kadohata creates an imagined future not wholly detached from issues of race and identity, but where the conceptualization of race-based identity is conceived by means of self-fashioning and self-signifying. In the novel\u2019s \u201cfuturistic\u201d American society, concerns of class and the divides of wealth between the white \u201crichtowns\u201d and the multiracial majority may seem to be the central themes, but issues of race and issues of class become conflated in the novel, and Kadohata uses more subtle ways to discuss issues of racial difference.\u00a0 What Kadohata suggests through her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love<\/em> is not that racialized bodies cease to be of importance in American society, but that race as a critical factor in identity formation and categorization must be reframed by self-signification and social interactions.<\/p>\n

…Kadohata\u2019s indictment of current racial understanding goes further as Francie, the mixed race narrator, is marginalized by our current monoracial understanding of race as the determinant factor of identity. She says, \u201cI enjoyed the feeling of the heat making my loose shorts billow around my yellow-brown legs\u2014the yellow from my Japanese mother, the brown from my Chinese-black father\u201d (22). Viet Thanh Nguyen<\/a> suggests in Race and Resistance<\/em> that Francie embodies \u201cthe novel\u2019s conception of nonwhite identity as being a m\u00e9lange of different ethnic and racial backgrounds\u201d (150). While the narrator does occupy the space of the raced majority within the novel, her value as a mixed race character does not end at being the embodiment of the \u201cnovel\u2019s conception\u201d of a \u201cnonwhite identity.\u201d Francie as a mixed-race subject maintains her position as marginalized in our current understanding of racial categorization. Keeping with the notion of the body, Kadohata locates Francie\u2019s indeterminacy in her yellow-brown skin, which is not easily identified as one race or another, until Francie herself declares where she \u201cbelongs.\u201d Knowing what races and ethnicities Francie belongs to serves a purpose beyond making her a mixture of incongruent elements of race and therefore some sort of representative of everything \u201cnonwhite\u201d as Nguyen suggests; her \u201cparts\u201d are named, and so while she may embody the majority within the text, she is still marginalized by our current understanding of race along monoracial lines. By making the protagonist a \u201cm\u00e9lange,\u201d Kadohata renders this multiracial character incapable of being assigned identity by physical racial markers and forces Francie to seek a different means by which she must forge an identity…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata\u2019s In the Heart of the Valley of Love Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies Volume 1 (2010) pages 61-69 Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts In an interview for the journal MELUS, Hsiu-chuan Lee claims that Cynthia Kadohata […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,125,1196,20],"tags":[3728,3724,3725,6055,3726,3727],"class_list":["post-8708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-identitydevelopment","category-literary-criticism","category-usa","tag-asian-american-literature-discourses-pedagogies","tag-cynthia-kadohata","tag-hsiu-chuan-lee","tag-nicole-m-rabin","tag-nicole-myoshi-rabin","tag-nicole-rabin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8708"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49717,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8708\/revisions\/49717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}