Third-space encounters and unexpected forms of resistance in Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

Abstract

This paper sets out to investigate Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, a liminal work written in-between cultures, in the light of Homi Bhabha's concept of the third space as a site of transformation and transvaluation. It is argued that Tan's novel is implicated in unexpected forms of resistance as a result of its placement in the borderland of cultures. Thus, exploring the discursive fissures and ideological ruptures inscribed in the novel, the authors seek to bring to fore how the very mainstream accounts of Chinese culture and orientalist archive of knowledge in which the work is embedded are contested in the third-space enounters between subjects of different cultures. Orientalism, Western feminism, American Dream, and multiculturalism are some of the major discourses whose truthfulness and serenity are shown to be precarious and open to questioning, hence the recuperation of the subaltern's voice through this contrapuntal reading.