Asian American Literature

A set of broadly conceived questions shapes this study: What constitutes Asian American literature or Asian American literary criticism? What are its founding ideals and the contexts of their rearticulation into different political commitments? Furthermore, what is the nature of the field's shift from its earlier group-or nation-based identity quests to its current investment in post-ethnic or post-racial imaginaries? To what extent does the field's transnational critique of the existential conditions facing Asian Americans-as many testify to undergoing social abjection or racial melancholia-work to rectify such conditions in a social-material sense? And to what extent does this critique, often enacted as a form of epistemological struggles, end up extricating Asian American critics from the need to work through the force field of the American nation-state, which give rise to their sense of alienation in the first place? Beyond identity issues, what might "literary form" mean in the wake of New Criticism? Are the methods of post-humanist theory historically specific enough for investigating the complexity of Asian American experience, affect, and literary artistry? How do we define the social function of Asian American literature under the all-encompassing premise of cultural studies, which, in its penchant for textualizing the social and political, tends to dissolve a minimal level of distinction between an imagined world and an empirically verifiable reality? Can the Asian American literary profession still maintain its capacity to identify, value, and encourage socially grounded literary knowledge under the influence of market-driven critical fashions or an individualistically based academic star system? In this study, Asian American literature is understood as a discourse constructed out of its engagement with and articulation through a specific set of historical contingencies of the 1960s and the 1970s: racial tensions in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, mounting protests against the US role in Vietnam, the impacts of the Third World Liberation Front struggles for decolonization and self-determination, identity politics, community work, feminism, counterculture, and intermittent resurgences of political conservatism. From today's point of view, it seems obvious that Asian American literature's initial self-insertion into public awareness through the effort of Aiiieeeee! did not lead to this literature's full-fledged incorporation into the cultural establishment. 2 Instead, the critical agendas advanced by this anthology-and modified through the arguments made in its 1991 sequel The Big Aiiieeeee!-have become a site of prolonged and uncompromising debates among Asian American writers and critics because of their obvious limitations: that is, the editors' male-oriented conception of 1 4 Asian American Literature diehard notions of masculinity and femininity in both Asian and Western cultures" (Cheung 1989, 234, 240). This bicultural/comparative critique of traditional Eastern/Western conceptions of the difference between masculinity and femininity in binaristic terms is essential to Cheung's reading of silence as a coded metaphor in her 1993 monograph Articulate Silence: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. She shows, through close analyses of the writings by these Asian American women writers, that the significance of non-Western deployment and interpretation of silence lies, ultimately, in its refusal to privilege direct speech over insinuation, a tendency that she finds predominant in the positions both taken by the editors of Aiiieeeee! and assumed by most North American feminist scholars (Cheung 1993, 9). Shirley Lim, more interested in forging a linkage between US-based ethnic studies and Western feminism, urges instead for an "ethnic nuancing" of Euro-American feminist conventions, while designating Asian American women's writing as the exemplary site for refiguring female subjectivity as one capable of creatively responding to the demands of both gendered and ethnically specific imperatives (Lim 1993b, 572-3). These early efforts to interrogate the masculinist premise of Asian American literary/cultural history espoused by Aiiieeeee! and modified by The Big Aiiieeeee! anticipated a burgeoning of Asian American scholarship, especially in the form of monographs, which use female gender as the starting point for advancing the field as an ethnic-specific literary enterprise. A partial list of such achievements would include Wendy Ho's In Her Mother's "This book introduces Asian American literary studies by engaging the conditions, contingencies, and immediate and long-term effects of its major debates. Two rationales inform Ling's presentation of the field in this way: first is a felt need to provide recognizable contours and trajectories for the evolution of Asian American criticism as an ethnic-specific minoritarian formation in the United States; second is an imperative to historicize its practices-including polemics, controversies, and ideological ruptures-as an ongoing negotiation undertaken by Asian American critics for a more self-conscious and more adequate representation of the field's interests. These rationales are fully contextualized in the book's Introduction and Conclusion. The main body of this study is organized non-chronologically into eight chapters, with each designed to reflect how the field has been energized by its demographic transformation, its growing intellectual heterogeneity, its defining moments, and its cross-cutting relationship with the trends in other disciplines. What has emerged and been given prominence to in the surveys and discussions of this book then constitute the essential criticism of Asian American literary studies, a discourse almost five decades in the making when examined retrospectively"-- Provided by publisher. This book introduces Asian American literary studies by engaging the conditions, contingencies, and immediate and long-term effects of its major debates. Two rationales inform Ling's presentation of the field in this way: first is a felt need to provide recognizable contours and trajectories for the evolution of Asian American criticism as an ethnic-specific minoritarian formation in the United States; second is an imperative to historicize its practices - including polemics, controversies, and ideological ruptures - as an ongoing negotiation undertaken by Asian American critics for a more self-conscious and more adequate representation of the field's interests. These rationales are fully contextualized in the book's Introduction and Conclusion. The main body of this study is organized non-chronologically into 8 chapters, with each designed to reflect how the field has been energized by its demographic transformation, its growing intellectual heterogeneity, its defining moments, and its cross-cutting relationship with the trends in other disciplines. What has emerged and been given prominence to in the surveys and discussions of this book then constitute the essential criticism of Asian American literary studies, a discourse almost 5 decades in the making when examined retrospectively.. An introduction to Asian American literary studies, this book simultaneously engages the conditions, contingencies, and immediate and long-term effects of its major debates. In doing so, it addresses two needs: first, to provide recognizable contours and trajectories for the evolution of Asian American criticism as an ethnic-specific minoritarian formation in the United States; second, to historicize its practices-including polemics, controversies, and ideological ruptures-as an ongoing negotiation undertaken by Asian American critics for a more self-conscious and more adequate representation of the field’s interests. The book’s introduction and conclusion contextualize the books aims and rationale, while the following eight chapters – organized non-chronologically – are each designed to reflect how the field has been energized by its demographic transformation, its growing intellectual heterogeneity, its defining moments, and its cross-cutting relationship with the trends in other disciplines. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series 3 Title 6 Copyright 7 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 12 Chapter 1 Race, Gender, and Class: Overlapping Formations 22 Chapter 2 The Necessity and Fiction of “Asian America” 44 Chapter 3 Intercultural and Generational Concerns 66 Chapter 4 The Transnational Turn 86 Chapter 5 The Social Function of Literature 108 Chapter 6 Aesthetic Form 128 Chapter 7 Protocols and the Politics of Institutionalization 148 Chapter 8 Emerging Interests 168 Conclusion Anti-essentialist Critique and the Asian American Literary Profession 188 Notes 196 Bibliography 206 Index 236