Borderless Life Sentences: A Multimodal Exploration of the Liminality of Postmigrant Asian American Identity and Belonging
Abstract
Delving into the South-East Asian and Asian American postmigrant condition, this study examines how postmigratory experiences of migrant communities shape identity, home, othering, and belonging within contemporary racialized American society. Analyzing a curated selection of four artworks in multiple media by Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese American artists—Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Do Ho Suh's Home-series installations, Julie Ha and Eugene Yi's documentary Free Chol Soo Lee, and Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's graphic narrative Monstress—the research explores how postmigrant artists navigate transnational belonging and mixed cultural identities.
As generational successors to migrant communities, these artists offer intimate perspectives on their generation’s lifeworld, steering through complex themes of precarious existence, and cultural hybridity, constructing in the process a postmigrant social imaginary. Through depictions of evolving subjectivities and reimagined agency in a transnational, intersectional world, these creative engagements reflect a deliberate effort to reshape the realities of postmigrant existence. The study analyzes the community’s engagement with dynamics of assimilation and alienation, antagonism and complicity, to examine how migrant subjects negotiate discrimination while maintaining agency in everyday practices.
Through comparative analysis across multiple artistic mediums, this research demonstrates how creative expressions serve not only to document experiences of othering and resistance but also as a transformative tool for imagining multifaceted human diversity, creating inclusive narratives of identity and belonging in a transnational, cosmopolitan context.