Scholar-Public Intellectual

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (2) ◽  
pp. 406-412
Author(s):  
Min Hyoung Song
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Literature And Politics ◽  
Resistance Literature ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
Job Offers

Viet thanh nguyen's recent successes might appear to have come out of nowhere. before the sympathizer won the pulitzer prize and Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War was long-listed for the National Book Award, and before he was named a MacArthur Fellow, Nguyen was another hardworking academic, laboring away in a field that no one outside it knew much about. For those who labored alongside him in the same field, the story looks different. When many of us were finishing graduate school and looking for our first teaching jobs, there was a joke going around that all the applicants on the market that year were waiting to find out what Nguyen would do. He had gotten all the job offers in the field, and the other top contenders were hanging out on the waiting list. His irst book, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (2002), a study of how the idea of resistance circulates in critical discussions of Asian American literature, landed with a splash, becoming one of those works other scholars had to be familiar with. What made it stand out was his insistence that we not idealize resistance. If the standard story that scholars liked to tell was that Asian American literature adopted a radical posture when it came to race, seeking to critique racism and to conjure alternative social possibilities, Nguyen pointed out that the story was incomplete. Asian Americans, including creative writers, are as heterogeneous ideology-wise as they are heterogeneous in every other way.

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.

The Vietnam War and Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Nock-Hee Park
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Dynamic Range ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Vietnamese American ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The Third World

The first wave of the now-canonical literature of the Vietnam War featured the GI grunt, the wary officer, and the rock-and-roll journalist—all embattled and disillusioned white men. These fictions, memoirs, and reportage came to define the expressive labor shaped by the ethical morass of the war, and these differing genres melded in the cinematic renaissance occasioned by the Vietnam War, which installed a generation of American auteurs. Asian American writers contended with this potent cultural formation, not only to critique the popular imagination of white innocence lost, but to claim the force and even intoxication of this cultural juggernaut. Asian American literary texts from the 1970s onward were shaped by the war and its aftermath—notably including the resistance movements it sparked—and the 21st-century rise of Vietnamese American reckonings with the war’s legacy has instigated significant reappraisals of the aims and effects of the war. The foundational Asian American literary writings of Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin weighed the service of the Asian American soldier in Vietnam in the context of the Third World movements that drove the formation of Asian American studies. A decade later, the publication of bestselling memoirs by Le Ly Hayslip, popularly heralded as the emergence of a Vietnamese American voice, marked the origins of a burgeoning field of writing, wide-ranging in form and genre but arrayed alongside and against the mainstream imagination of Vietnam. The major fiction of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) has come to stand as a culminating literary riposte to the canonized first wave of Vietnam War literature: Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel exposes long-standing fictions of U.S. conduct and foregrounds a complex Asian American and refugee perspective. Asian American literature of the Vietnam War expresses a dynamic range of felt responses to the cultural history of the war to produce imaginative work that interrogates the war’s iconic images and reveals its unseen subjects.

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.

“This Doesn't Mean What You'll Think”: Native Speaker, Allegory, Race

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 575-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elda E. Tsou
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Asian America ◽  
New Formalism ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Politics Of Race

This article contributes to the new formalism by considering the relation between literary form and race. It argues that Chang-rae Lee's novel Native Speaker is primarily concerned with its own figurative activity and that only when the analytic framework is shifted away from Asian America and toward allegory does the novel's far-ranging critique of whiteness, referential language, and native speaking become apparent. This figurative activity consists of strategies of concealment that disguise their artfulness by posing as self-evident or referential. Race, espionage, and allegory are examples of this representational mode, defined by hiding in plain sight. As part of a larger argument for formal analysis in Asian American literature, the article explores how the novel's central tropes figure the figuration of Asian American experience, and it seeks to demonstrate how reading for form can sharpen the politics of race.

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.

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).

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