Disability Studies and Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Chew
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Model Minority Myth ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Intellectual Abilities ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
The 19Th Century

Twenty-first-century understandings of how disability figures in Asian American literature and the representation of Asian American individuals have greatly evolved. Earlier, highly pejorative characterizations associated with the 19th-century “Oriental” or “yellow peril” as a carrier of disease whose body needed to be quarantined and excluded. Later, the model minority myth typecast Asian Americans as having extreme intellectual abilities to the point of freakishness. Disability studies asserts that having an “imperfect” disabled body is nothing to hide and questions beliefs in norms of behavior and experience. Focusing on disability in Asian American literature opens a new path to reflect on Asian American identity and experience in ways that break away from the racial types and narrative trajectories of immigrant success that have often been seen as defining what it is to be Asian American. Integrating a disability studies perspective into Asian American studies provides a compelling and necessary means of critiquing stereotypes such as the model minority myth, as well as to reread many classic texts of Asian American literature with attentiveness to difference, impairment, and loss.

The Chinese Exclusion Act and Early Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Railton
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Laws And Policies ◽  
Immigration Station ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Exclusion Act

The 19th century featured two opposed yet interconnected historical trends: the growth of a multigenerational and deeply rooted Chinese American community; and the development of the cultural prejudices and fears comprised by the Yellow Peril narrative. Those xenophobic fears produced violence, social and political movements, and legal exclusions, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and its many follow-up laws and policies, all designed as much to destroy the existing Chinese American community as to restrict future immigration. But out of that period of exclusion and oppression came some of the first Chinese American literary and cultural works published in both Mandarin/Cantonese and English: the personal and collective poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station by detainees; auto-ethnographic memoirs of Chinese American life and community such as Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America (1909); and the journalistic, autobiographical, and fictional works of Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far, the first Chinese American professional creative writer. These works both reflect and transcend the realities of the Exclusion era, helping contemporary audiences understand those histories, connect them to later Chinese American writers, and analyze the exclusionary debates and proposals of the early 21st century.

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.

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.

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.

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