ABSTRACT
Discussions about intermediality in the humanities still largely take the form of assertions about the death of the book. In Gert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert's useful work on comics and pedagogy, for instance, they suggest that "the decline of the book as the dominant medium for the dissemination and acquisition of knowledge" necessitates a change in methodology for humanistic teaching and scholarship. In her 2010 magnum opus, I Hotel, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita composes an innovative intermedial text that questions the very architecture of the novel even as it articulates a space for the multiplicity of Asian American and interethnic identities in the history of American letters. Questions of definition haunt I Hotel, Yamashita's 600-plus page meditation on race, gender, and the politics of identity from the period of the late 1960s to the present.
