Of Unsound Mind: Madness and Mental Health in Asian American Literature

Abstract

This project interrogates four conditions characterized as being “of unsound mind:” hysteria, mutism, psychosis, and depression in 20th century and contemporary Asian American literature. Through reading texts by Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ha Jin, Nieh Hualing, and Ling Ma, I contend that that the intersection of madness/mental health and race necessarily points to the symbolic valences of these conditions in the social, cultural, political and/or aesthetic realms. In each of the texts I examine, madness/mental illness operates in a space between the symbolic and material. I argue that individual experiences of madness/mental illness in Asian American literature must be understood within larger social, economic, political, and aesthetic concerns, and depictions of madness/mental illness in these literary works fall somewhere in between metaphor/conceit and lived, material experiences. Depictions of madness/mental illness becomes a site for addressing issues of racial oppression, citizenship, racial solidarity (or a lack thereof), and migration without operating as a liberatory or celebratory force. Rather, madness/mental illness in these works put into relief the contradictions and intricacies of both individual and collective efforts of navigating racialization.

I use the terms mental health, mental illness, and madness in tandem with each other to both signal and challenge a clinical vs. cultural divide or a biomedical vs. activist divide in thinking about madness/mental illness. Madness operates as both a deliberately vague term that signifies a cultural and aesthetic discourse of being “of unsound mind” and additionally as a reclamation and embrace of madness as a site of activism. The term mental illness, on the other hand, falls under the larger category of the biomedical framework of mental health to denote mental disorders at the clinical level. In positioning these terms together, I acknowledge the growing popular discourse surrounding mental health activism and therapeutic culture that inevitably bears on discourses of madness to both critique and envision a way forward at the intersection of madness and mental health.