Signifying the Liminal and Simian: Liberating Agency of Tricksters in Ethnic American Novels

Abstract

This dissertation explores ethnic American novels—Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada, Louis Erdrich's Tracks, and Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book— to trace the construction of trickster characters and discourse. Reed exploits multiple trickster heritages and signifying NeoHoodoo discourse in his novel through anachronistic conflation of time and profusion of intertextual details. Similarly, Erdrich's novel depicts how the transitional setting of the novel, behavior of the principal characters in the period of stress and loss, and the cultural options they opt for their survival under duress dub them into the liminal tricksters. Likewise, Kingston's novel presents a simian protagonist to maintain the revisionist or counterculture tendency and to establish trickster discourse that signifies upon the seminal literary and mythical repertoire and denies any form of reductive stereotypes. Construction of such trickster figures and trope confers the same agency upon these authors to liberate ethnic American writing from the received images of stereotypes and to forge a transformed cultural and literary expression of ethnic Americans.