Asian American Detective Fiction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Calvin McMillin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian Descent ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Detective Genre

Asian American detective fiction is an eclectic body of literature that encompasses works from a variety of 20th- and 21st-century Asian American authors. Prior to the emergence of these writers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, depictions of Asians and Asian Americans in the mystery genre were primarily the domain of white authors like Earl Derr Biggers and John P. Marquand. During the pre-World War II era, “Oriental detectives” like Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto enjoyed varying degrees of popularity in literature and film before gradually fading into obscurity. Meanwhile, the few U.S. writers of Asian descent working in the detective genre often refrained from portraying Asian American characters in their works, focusing instead on stories involving white protagonists. However, a sea change occurred when a wave of Asian American authors arrived on the crime fiction scene: Henry Chang, Leonard Chang, Dale Furutani, Naomi Hirahara, and Ed Lin are representative examples. Differentiating themselves from their Asian American predecessors, these writers focused their mysteries not only on detectives of Asian descent but on the specific ethnic communities in which they were born. Using the detective genre’s focus on “Whodunit” as a literary imperative, these works explore contemporary anxieties about Asian American identity in relation to issues of race, gender, sexuality, and national belonging. As a result, many Asian American writers of detective fiction have chosen to reframe Asian American identity through the use of the detective genre, a vehicle through which the racist stereotypes of the past are addressed, combatted, and symbolically defeated. Whether a genre, subgenre, or school of literature, Asian American detective fiction is a rich and ever-evolving form of literary expression that continues to both expand upon and complicate earlier discourses on race, gender, and sexuality within the realms of U.S. crime fiction and contemporary Asian American literature.

Parody, Pastiche, and Intertextuality in Asian American Novels

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Tang
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Cultural Integrity ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Dominant Ideologies ◽  
Asian American Identity

The repetition and reframing of styles, forms, and texts variously known as pastiche, parody, intertextuality, appropriation, or sampling is a pervasive practice in Asian American literature. Since the emergence of Asian American literary studies in the 1970s, such strategies have formed a key site for negotiating the terms of Asian American identity, politics, and culture. While pastiche has been recognized as a signature style of postmodern culture at large, it has held particular significance for Asian American literary and cultural studies because of its resonance with Asian American identity. Because Asian Americans have long been stereotyped as mimics of Western culture, and because the category Asian American refers to a coalition of multiple and diverse ethnic groups, Asian American identity itself seems constituted by the formal operations of imitation and recombination central to parody and pastiche. The close alignment between Asian American identity and these formal practices has made shifting critical attitudes toward parody, pastiche, and intertextuality into a telling register of evolving conceptions of Asian American identity. In the cultural nationalist era of the 1970s, pastiche was seen as the formal expression of Asian Americans’ tendency to repeat and reproduce dominant ideologies, a sign of complicity with white racism, and a lack of cultural integrity. By contrast, a second wave of Asian American criticism in the 1990s embraced strategies of textual repetition as subversive parody rather than complicit pastiche, reinterpreting them as articulations of a politically oppositional, hybrid and heterogeneous Asian American subject. Since the turn of the millennium, the use of parody, pastiche, and intertextuality in Viet Nguyen’s prize-winning 2015 novel The Sympathizer intimates yet another iteration of Asian American identity centered on the war refugee, a model of Asian American subjectivity which shifts attention from traditional topics of immigration and assimilation to urgent questions of imperialism and militarism. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how the formal strategies of parody, pastiche, and intertextuality have served as crucial sites for the invention and reinvention of Asian American identity, politics, and aesthetics.

scholarly journals "Writing into the Rupture": Visual Selves in Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment

Meliora ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hana Rivers
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The Body ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Critical Race Studies ◽  
Lyric Essay ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Asian American Identity

Multimedia texts are gaining more footing in the Asian American literary world, especially following Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s pre-eminent Dictee (1982). While lesser known, Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment (2018) is a highly referential lyric essay that employs visual elements, including personal ephemera, to consider the unrelenting complexities of Asian American identity. Analyzing Arnold’s formal intervention into Asian American literature through Francesca Woodman’s photography and Roland Barthes’ photography theory reveals that visual subjects are evasive and unknowable. Paradoxically, memorabilia has the power to rupture linear notions of time and cast into doubt what we know about past and present selves. Arnold’s engagement with the visual also extends to the body, and throughout the text she unsettles hegemonic constructions of gender and racial signification. Ultimately, an analysis of Litany for the Long Moment reveals that visual subjects rupture the concept of a stable self. Throughout this thesis, I draw from the fields of photography, poststructuralism, and critical race studies to argue that visual representation is not a sufficient mode of racial empowerment. Building off of Arnold’s claims about “writing into the rupture,” lack is not a closure, but an opening through which we can interrogate what it means to be a self.

Nikkei Baseball

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel O. Regalado
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Meiji Era ◽  
Asian American Identity

Nikkei Baseball examines baseball's evolving importance to the Japanese American community and the construction of Japanese American identity. Originally introduced in Japan in the late 1800s, baseball was played in the United States by Japanese immigrants first in Hawaii, then San Francisco and northern California, then in amateur leagues up and down the Pacific Coast. For Japanese American players, baseball was seen as a sport that encouraged healthy competition by imposing rules and standards of ethical behavior for both players and fans. The value of baseball as exercise and amusement quickly expanded into something even more important, a means for strengthening social ties within Japanese American communities and for linking their aspirations to America's pastimes and America's promise. Drawing from archival research, prior scholarship, and personal interviews, this book explores key historical factors such as Meiji-era modernization policies in Japan, American anti-Asian sentiments, internment during World War II, the postwar transition, economic and educational opportunities in the 1960s, the developing concept of a distinct “Asian American” identity, and Japanese Americans' rise to the major leagues with star players including Lenn Sakata and Kurt Suzuki and even managers such as the Seattle Mariners' Don Wakamatsu.

scholarly journals The Role of Anthologies in Developing Approaches to The Study of Asian American Literature

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Contemporary American Literature ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Asian Descent ◽  
The Status ◽  
Asian American Identity

The article reviews the role and position of the first anthologies of American literature written by writers of Asian descent, due to which the outlines for what are now commonly known as Asian American literary studies were defined. A close analysis of these anthologies enables to realize why the existence of a unified collective Asian American identity, which was proclaimed in the second half of the 20th century, is being questioned at the milestone of the 20th and 21st centuries. It gives reason to state that the anthologies did not only emphasize the status quo of literature created by American writers of Asian descent, but also formed fracture lines along which at the end of the 20th century efforts were made to deprive Asian-American literature of the status of marginal, secondary and present it as a full-fledged component of American literary continuum. The first one can be described as “beyond the hyphen”. The second trajectory of the search for a way out of ethnic shelter at the end of the 20th century is aimed at “reconfiguring the canon”. It involves not only a demand of being fully involved into the American literary tradition, but also a search for its role in shaping, if not generating contemporary American literature. The anthologies that hold the primacy in the discovery of American writers of Asian descent, as a literary fact on one side, were both a continuation and rethinking of the tradition of Eastern (Chinese/Japanese) anthologies. On the other hand, despite the extremely compressed theoretical foundation for the essence of this wing of American literature, they show the extent and dynamism of its understanding and interpretation as an integral part of Western literary discourse.

scholarly journals Strategic Hybridity in Early Chinese and Japanese American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Floyd Cheung
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese Character ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
Japanese American Literature

Early Chinese and Japanese American male writers between 1887 and 1938 such as Yan Phou Lee, Yung Wing, Sadakichi Hartmann, Yone Noguchi, and H. T. Tsiang accessed dominant US publishing markets and readerships by presenting themselves and their works as cultural hybrids that strategically blended enticing Eastern content and forms with familiar Western language and structures. Yan Phou Lee perpetrated cross-cultural comparisons that showed that Chinese were not unlike Europeans and Americans. Yung Wing appropriated and then transformed dominant American autobiographical narratives to recuperate Chinese character. Sadakichi Hartmann and Yone Noguchi combined poetic traditions from Japan, Europe, and America in order to define a modernism that included cosmopolitans such as themselves. And H. T. Tsiang promoted Marxist world revolution by experimenting with fusions of Eastern and Western elements with leftist ideology. Although these writers have been discounted by some critics as overly compromising in their attempts to reach Western readers, they accomplished laudable cultural work in their particular historical circumstances and provide insights into the varied and complicated negotiations of Asian American identity during the exclusion era.

Race, Region, Rule: Genre and the Case of Charlie Chan

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (5) ◽  
pp. 1463-1481 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles J. Rzepka
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Unique Feature ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Stated Goal ◽  
Racial Representation ◽  
European Americans ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
Definition Of

This essay analyzes genre's impact on racial representation in a body of popular fiction that has shaped European Americans' definition of Asian American identity for more than three-quarters of a century: the Charlie Chan novels of Earl Derr Biggers. To advance his stated goal of overturning Chinese stereotypes, Biggers experimented with genres of locale and criminality. The Hawaiian setting of his first Chan story, The House without a Key, challenged the generic topography of Chinatown regionalism by invoking a counterintuitive regionalist prototype, while the book's plot followed the conventions of classical detective fiction, a highly formulaic subgenre of crime literature that perpetuated racist stereotypes while dominating best-seller lists throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Exploiting a unique feature of the detective formula known as rule subversion, however, Biggers enlisted the genre's very tendencies toward racism to undermine racist stereotypes.

Narratives of Intimacy in Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolyn Woodcock
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Family Formation ◽  
Direct Result ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Asian America ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
Physical Spaces

Narratives of intimacy in Asian American literature reveal a number of hidden histories and probe complex issues that challenge a US-centered identity or label Asian American. Asian American literature grapples with these by representing the spaces where interracial sexual, romantic, and familial relationships form, many of them the direct result of US-led war and militarism in Asia and the Pacific over the 20th century, and especially since World War II. Using intimacy as a mode of analysis demonstrates that reading literature and the intimacies of private relationships are both imaginative world-building processes. That is, personal relations cannot be disentangled from the physical spaces where they happen and the geopolitical contexts that frame them. From some of those spaces, “monstrous” Asian American families emerge. Defying the normative tropes of immigration and assimilation that have been familiar in post-1965 Asian American literature, late-20th- and 21st-century narratives contemplate how militarized intimacies are central to Asian American family formation. Though experiences of militarized intimacy are prevalent, they have not been prominent in defining Asian American identity. Literature offers a mode for sustained engagement with these discomforting histories of personal and political intimacy and prompts audiences to question what they “know” about the constructions Asia(n), America(n), and Asian America(n).

Asian American Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 218-231
Author(s):  
Julia H. Lee
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Asian American Identity

This chapter examines the use of realism in Asian American literature and the debate surrounding its political and aesthetic meanings in Asian American literary criticism. Even though realist narratives have dominated Asian American literary history, the use and significance of realism nevertheless continue to stir controversy within the field. The chapter explores both sides of the “realism controversy” within Asian American studies and makes the case that realism exposes the contradictions of Asian American identity and that Asian American identity exposes the contradictions of realism. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” (1950), focusing on how the author deploys a realist mode of narration to reveal the historically contingent process by which Japanese American identity and community in the internment era are constituted.

From Merging Histories to Emerging Identities: An “Asian” Museum as a Site of Pan-ethnic Identity Promotion

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-54
Author(s):  
Chong-suk Han ◽  
Edward Echtle
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Pacific Islander ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian Pacific Islander ◽  
Common Problems ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
Asian Pacific ◽  
A Site

In this paper, we explore the significance of the Wing Luke Asian Museum (WLAM) in Seattle, Washington as a site where pan-ethnic Asian American identity can be promoted by analyzing the strategies employed by the staff and artists of the WLAM to promote, foster and disseminate a larger Asian Pacific Islander American pan-ethnic identity. We argue that museums are a significant site that can “provide a setting for persons of diverse Asian backgrounds to establish social ties and to discuss their common problems and experiences.”

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