Nation, Diaspora, and Asian American Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeehyun Lim
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The State ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Asian America ◽  
A Site ◽  
Crucial Part

Abstract Read together, Patricia Chu’s Where I have Never Been (2019), Jinah Kim’s Postcolonial Grief (2019), Sze Wei Ang’s The State of Race (2019), and Janna Odabas’s The Ghosts Within (2018) allow for a review of the state and meaning of diaspora and diasporic frames of analysis in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. Approaching these books through the 1990s debate on minority nationalism in Asian American studies shows one prominent direction that critical engagements with transnationalism have taken. While postcolonialism’s place in the 1990s debate on transnationalism and Asian America was tenuous at best, these books suggest that it has become a crucial part of envisioning the critical work diasporic Asian American culture can do. In these books, diasporic frames of analysis lead to recognizing Asian American culture as a site where the unresolved and unaccounted for violence of US nationalism and globalization surfaces and challenges to dominant ideas of race and nation appear. Both as method of inquiry and as historical understanding of twentieth-century US–Asian relations, postcolonialism in these books shows the critical potential of diaspora for Asian America.

Transpacific Asymmetries

boundary 2 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 89-115
Author(s):  
Chih-ming Wang
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Culture History ◽  
Migration Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Interpretation

In honor of the late Masao Miyoshi, whose work has opened a transpacific dimension in Asian American studies, this essay first explores the notion of asymmetry, which is seminal to his critical vision, to build an analytical framework for understanding and evaluating the transnational impulses in recent Asian American literature. Using asymmetry as an analytical lens, it then provides a critical interpretation of Ruth Ozeki’s important novel A Tale for the Time Being (2013) to consider the intricate connections between Asia and North America that are embedded in the subterranean history of war, migration, resistance, and hope. By foregrounding the entangled, even complicit, transpacific transactions in Asian American narratives, this essay will not only speak to the complexities of the transpacific turn in Asian American studies but will also remind us of the importance of Miyoshi’s off-centered approach to questions of culture, history, and politics undeterred by borders.

Hemispheric Approaches to Asian American Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald C. Goellnicht
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Asian American ◽  
North American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Asian North American

Hemispheric approaches to Asian American literature disrupt, supplement, and interrogate the cultural nationalist focus of early Asian American studies, transpacific and transnational approaches to Asian American studies that came to prominence in the 1990s, and the overall dominance of the United States in Asian American studies. These approaches have largely been championed by scholars working in Canada or on Canadian material, by feminist and queer scholars, and by those working on interethnic or interracial approaches between “Asian American” and black/African American, Latinx, and/or Native/Indigenous communities. The term “hemispheric” was preceded by Asian North American, which has been employed from fairly early in the maturing of Asian American literary and cultural criticism. Key also is the scholarly history of hemispheric approaches to Asian North American literature and culture (and to a lesser extent Asian Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture), the cross-border relations between artists and activists of Asian descent in North America, and the U.S. cultural imperialism inherent in this approach as well as its potential to diversify and open up the field of Asian American literary and cultural studies. The hemispheric approach also uncovers some of the limitations of the “transnational” and “diaspora” approaches that currently dominate Asian American studies and emphasize an east-west, transpacific spatiality.

Asian American Literary Reception and Readership

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Bhalla
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Literary Education ◽  
Literary Reception

Asian American literary studies, and multi-ethnic literatures more broadly, have maintained a constant faith in the power of literature as a potential tool of anti-racist education. This faith in literature’s potential is not naïve, since it also recognizes how even the most diverse and ideal literary education can be co-opted by the workings of capitalism and neoliberalism. These fields are founded in an enduring and powerful belief that literature affects the social, cultural, and political esteem of a minority group in the United States. Within the field of Asian American studies, academics, activists, and cultural critics have sought to harness the power of various forms of cultural discourse and literature by mediating the stories told about (and at times by) Asian Americans. As Asian American literature has grown in popularity, there has been increasing attention to questions of who is represented within Asian American literature and who is deemed worthy to produce these representations. Such concerns have over time produced an abiding if somewhat tacit interest in questions of literary reception in the field. In fact, although many of the major literary controversies in Asian American studies have circulated around questions of representation and reception and ushered in paradigm shifts in how the field has conceptualized itself, it is an area that remains understudied. Asian American literary reception study and studies of readership are still emerging and crucial areas of analysis that could pose and posit answers to questions of literature’s possibilities and limitations as a tool of anti-racism in 21st-century America.

scholarly journals Book Review: Asian American Society: An Encyclopedia

2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 176
Author(s):  
Megan Coder
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Past President ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
American Society

Asian American Society: An Encyclopedia is a comprehensive four-volume reference work that consists of 315 in-depth entries discussing many aspects of Asian American culture. Editor Mary Yu Danico, a past-president of the Association for Asian American Studies and currently a professor at California State Polytechnic University, states in the introduction, “We recognize that it is impossible to discuss every facet of Asian American society, but we have put forth our best efforts to examine the historical, social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of our society through the lens of multiple disciplines and voices” (xxv).

Object Theory and Asian American Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Shomura
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Object Theory

Do considerations of Asian America as, to use Kandice Chuh’s words, a “subjectless discourse” entail a turn toward objects? “Object theory” refers to a broad range of intellectual currents that take up objecthood, things, and matter as starting points for reconceptualizing identity, experience, politics, and critique. A few prominent threads of object theory include new materialism, thing theory, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology. Versions of object theory have also been developed in disability studies, critical ethnic studies, posthumanism, and multispecies studies. What spans these varied, sometimes contentious fields is an effort to displace anthropocentrism as the measure of being and knowledge. By troubling the (human) subject, the poststructural and deconstructive turns in Asian American studies have especially primed the field to more closely engage the place of objects in Asian America. While Asian American writers and critics have tirelessly explored subjectivity and its mixed fortunes—from providing access to legal rights, political representation, and social resources to facilitating the reinforcement of racial and ethnic hierarchies—they have also sought to tweak the historical relationship of Asian Americans to objects. Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects. Asian American literary studies develops object theories to grasp these dynamics through investigations of racial form, modes of objecthood, material things, ecology, and speculative fiction. Ultimately, object theory leads Asian American literary studies to reconsider the place of human subjectivity in politics, attend to the formation of Asian America through nonhuman matter, and develop positive visions for Asian American futures from speculative imaginations of being and reality. This article discusses the place of object theory in Asian American literature and surveys key topics, including phenomenologies of race, transvaluations of objecthood, speculative realisms, and ontologies of Asian America.

An Asian American Epistemology of Reading: Aiiieeeee! and Ekphrasis

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elda E. Tsou
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Primary Object ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

The contested category of Asian American literature presents a rich opportunity to explore questions of epistemology. At the start of the 21st century, a formal turn in literary study further illuminates shifts in structures of knowledge and ways of knowing. Asian American literature emerged in the 1970s as a critical response to a history of exclusion and misrepresentation. As the field established itself, literary knowledge was defined quite narrowly: it is produced by Asian Americans and the subject of knowledge is Asian America itself. The reading practices that arise from this central paradigm have been called “instrumental” or “sociological,” insofar as they conceive of literary language, with varying degrees of formal interest, as an instrument or expression of Asian America. From the 2000s onward, scholarship on Asian American form and poetics has grown steadily, and what distinguishes this particular movement is its privileging of form as its primary object of investigation. Correspondingly the subject of knowledge also shifts from Asian America as the default referent to Asian American literature and the literary tradition. Critics note that one consequence of making form the prime objective is a potential tendency to drift away from the ambit of Asian America altogether. Those literary texts featuring conspicuous formal experimentation have garnered a lot of attention; less has been paid to the early texts, like the anthology Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), where formal concerns are not as explicit. Yet upon closer examination of Aiiieeeee! one discovers another type of figurative activity that can help redefine Asian American literary knowledge, offering us new ways of reading and looking at race.

From Multiculture to Polyculture in South Asian American Studies

1999 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-204
Author(s):  
Vijay Prashad
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
South Asians ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Southeast Asians ◽  
South Asian American ◽  
American Book

In 1997, Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (Maira and Srikanth). This was unexpected, not because of the quality of the book, but principally because of the little attention hitherto given to those who write about the “new immigrants” of the Americas (including South Asians, Filipinos, Southeast Asians, Africans, and West Asians). Prior to 1997, scholars and writers of South Asian America had been known to skulk in the halls of even such marginal events as the Asian American Studies Association and complain about the slight presence of South Asian American panels. That complaint can now be put to rest.

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