Résumé:
Examining notions of governmentality and the psychology of the governed, this
dissertation looks into how America passes policies concerning racial minorities, with a
special focus on how minorities come to identify themselves in Celeste Ng’s Our
Missing Hearts. The aim then is to understand how the US government attempts to
manufacture a new meaning to being Chinese or Asian, and to shed light on how its
apartheid policies. PACT, which is an institute for preserving tradition. Using the theory
of Racial Formation by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, supplemented with the
writings of Michel Foucault and Immanuel Kant on the Government of the Self and
Other, this dissertation uses the theories to observe how enforcement of racial
hierarchies is systematically constructed within the structural and psychological
spheres. The analysis reveals how the novel’s characters experience and resist
governmentality, and how they struggle with internalized mechanisms of control
embedded in the non-violent stratagems used by PACT to maintain authority through
controlling the internal faculties of the masses. This study contributes to the existing
literature by expanding on the subject of identity, power, and race by depicting minorities
as products of political construction rather than a natural phenomenon. It also offers
insights into how individuals respond to systematic oppression and control, negotiating
their identity by resisting or abiding, adynamic that remains pertinent in the history of the
US, which is still rife with racial conflict.
