Ideological Dissonance in Gish Jen’s The Resisters

Abstract

While existing scholarship has emphasized The Resisters’s resilient resistance, feminist commitments, faith in human nature, this paper contends that The Resisters simultaneously contradicts its own ethical ideals through its narrative construction of resistance: an ambivalent resister, the suffering martyr and the romanctic heroin. This narrative construction reveals Gish Jen’s dilemma as a writer: on one hand, she continues to uphold a cosmopolitan, pluralist ethical vision; on the other hand, the pressing realities of racial inequality and structural oppression compel her to attend to concrete, context-specific ethical positions.