Can You Tell by Looking? A Postvisible Definition of Asian American Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-569
Author(s):  
Sue-Im Lee
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
Real Definition ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract This essay identifies a need for a postvisible definition of Asian American literature. Traditionally Asian American literature has been identified by the racial descent of the writer and recognizable “Asian American” content, but such qualifications are no longer sufficient and prompt the question, “But is it Asian American?” In order to theorize a postvisible definition, this essay engages twentieth-century philosophy of art to delineate three distinct approaches to definition in Asian American literary history: a “real” definition in its founding period that pursued exactitude and empiricism in substantiating a new category of art called Asian American literature, to an anti-definition in the 1990s, and to the pluralist, nonnormative definition since 2000 in which identifying a text as Asian American is an exercise in persuasively situating the text within the Asian American literary artworld, not in identifying visibly “detectible” properties.

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.

The Malleability of Truth and Language in Chay Yew’s Porcelain and A Language of Their Own

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-314
Author(s):  
Quan-Manh Ha ◽  
Andrew Vigesaa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Western World ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Not Given ◽  
Objective Truth ◽  
Asian Men ◽  
The Status

Abstract In Asian American literature and drama, the pursuit of identity was at the forefront of discussion for much of the twentieth century. More and more frequently Asian American voices from the LGBTQ community have addressed intersectionality in established narratives. As issues of identity and intersectionality converge, postmodernity becomes a useful lens through which to examine the elements of this task. In Chay Yew’s plays entitled Porcelain and A Language of Their Own, the status of Asian identities in the Western world is not given a sure footing, but rather it is placed in a state of confusion. In Porcelain, this confusion stems from the tension between objective truth and the postmodern phenomenon of media-fueled panic. In A Language of Their Own, similar confusion arises between the subjective and performative conveying of meaning in language. These contrasting elements serve to highlight the postmodern search for identity among Asian men living in the Western world, where the complexities of identity are compounded by the subjectivity of truth.

Science Fictionality and Post-65 Asian American Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher T Fan
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
American Women Writers ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Chinese American Women ◽  
Contemporary Us Literature ◽  
Literary Histories ◽  
Material Conditions

Abstract Since 1965, Asian American authors have been key mediators of science fictionality, defined as a postwar fantasy that associates endless, industrial-led economic expansion with racialized groups of upwardly mobile professionals. This status is a consequence of the occupational concentration of Asian immigrants into professional-managerial careers, especially in scientific and technical fields: a phenomenon that can be traced back to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976) along with the debut works of recent Chinese American women writers, including Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), this article describes a dialectic of science fictionality and post-65 Asian American literature in which the latter develops autopoetic tendencies that register occupational concentration in genre, theme, characterization, and trope. This reorientation of post-65 Asian American literary history to the material conditions of science fictionality, rather than ethnic self-expression, has implications not only for understanding that history but also for generalized periodizations of contemporary US literature like the “genre turn,” which risk eliding the specificity of minority literary histories.

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