The Place of Memory and Resistance in I Hotel

This thesis analyzes Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel (2010) as a process of reconstruction of the memory of the advancement of the voices of Asian immigrants in the United States for aspiration for social reform and resistance from the late 1960s to the early 1970s toward a moment of solidarity. The stories of each chapter are analyzed as Asian immigrants’ memories of the past and the main agents of microscopic resistances following capitalist globalization in the late 1960s. I Hotel depicts the 10-year struggle of Asian immigrants to protect the International Hotel, which is on the verge of being demolished, as part of the 'Yellow Power Movement' with avant-garde narrative techniques. In particular, this novel dramatically contains the process through which immigrants from different national backgrounds converge on a common voice to defend desperately the I Hotel until August 3, 1977, the final chapter, when the immigrants resisted while making human barricades against forced demolition. Based on the foregoing, the I Hotel is understood as a place that implies the 70-year history of Asian immigrants in the United States at the time, and a place that reveals the governance structure of imperial inequality behind capitalist globalization. To this end, this study first analyzes the I hotel in I Hotel as a place of memory that revives the meaning of the historical time of Asian immigrants. In addition, this study regards that contemporary capitalist ideology is functioning in a way to dominates the body, and identity of Asian immigrants. Finally, this study analyzes that Asian immigrants with different ethnic identities are moving toward solidarity among ethnic minorities thanks to their common aspiration to protect the I Hotel despite their heterogeneity.