Science Fictionality and Post-65 Asian American Literature

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.

The Jewish Fusgeyer Migration Movement from Early Twentieth-Century Romania as Transcultural Rhetorical Tool in US Memorial Literary Culture

From 1900 to 1907, a so-called fusgeyer phenomenon was the most salient characteristic of Jewish emigration from Romania, given the high number of impoverished, desperate Jews who were on the brink of starvation and started to go on foot in the attempt to leave the country. My essay considers the literary representation of this fusgeyer movement over time as a conduit upholding transcultural networks of memory work in the United States. To that end, I will examine the representation of fusgeyers in the literature produced by immigrant fusgeyers to the United States immediately after emigration (M. E. Ravage’s 1917 An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant and Jacob Finkelstein’s 1942 “Memoirs of a Fusgeyer from Romania to America”) and in the literature created in contemporary times in the United States (Stuart Tower’s 2003 historical novel The Wayfarers). In my analysis, I rely on Astrid Erll’s demonstration that literature can be a powerful conduit of cultural memory by its use of “four modes of a ‘rhetoric of collective memory’: the experiential, the mythical, the antagonistic, and the reflexive mode.” I will show which of these modes of rhetoric apply to the literary works I consider and how they highlight a dynamic movement toward a transcultural type of rhetoric shaping Jewish memory forms in contemporary US literature.

The Ends of Human Rights in US Literary Studies

How has contemporary US literature responded to the rapid rise and subsequent decline of human rights in US political discourse? In this essay-review, I examine two recent works—James Dawes’s The Novel of Human Rights (2018) and Crystal Parikh’s Writing Human Rights (2017)—that each bring a critical human rights approach to the study of contemporary US literatures. The essay begins by describing the emergence of the subfield of literature and human rights and its original investment in methodologies of ideology critique. I then show how Dawes and Parikh each adopt a dialectical method to investigate the contradictory relationship between a subset of contemporary American novels and a US-centric, liberal conception of human rights, while also mapping the emergence of new generic forms. But can new kinds of stories transform human rights in practice? To address this question, the essay next examines the role of literature in recent historiographic debates about the origins of human rights in order to argue for a literary-historical turn in the subfield of literature and human rights. Calling for new work that grounds the subfield’s ongoing critique of human rights representations in specific historical practices of the human rights, I conclude by briefly considering Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) alongside her involvement with the human rights movement. Can a search for literary precursors help us imagine a different future for human rights?

Beat women poets and writers: countercultural urban geographies and feminist avant-garde poetics

The work of Beat women poets and their contribution to the Beat canon was neglected for decades until the late nineties. This study presents a critical appreciation of early Beat women poets and writers’ impact on contemporary US literature drawing from theoretical tools provided by feminist literary and poetry criticism and gender studies on geography. The aim is to situate this female literary community, in specific the one of late 1950s and 1960s in New York, within the Beat generation and to analyze the characteristics of their cultural and literary phenomena, highlighting two of their most important contributions from the point of view of gender, cultural and literary studies: their negotiation of urban geographies and city space as bohemian women and writers, and their revision of Beat aesthetics through a feminist avant-garde poetics.