Introduction

In the twenty-first century, Asian American studies has turned increasingly toward diasporic and transnational frameworks, even as some scholars have raised concerns about the loss of an Asian American identity and politics grounded in cultural nationalism. Drawing in part on the work of Paul Gilroy, I propose a new theory of “Asian diaspora” in which “Asian” identity emerges from a dialectic of national and transnational forces. Since the 1970s, this category of Asian identification has circulated among the United States, Canada, and Australia, white settler colonies with histories of Asian immigration and exclusion. The work of Asian poets in these locations registers, in content and form, the history of diaspora that gives rise to Asian identity.

"Writing into the Rupture": Visual Selves in Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment

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.

Family-Based Caregiving: Does Lumping Asian Americans Together Do More Harm than Good?

Asian American family caregivers have gained increased attention due to the need to provide life-sustaining aid at home given the rising numbers of older adults. This article reflects upon caregiving-related research studies that have overlooked the circumstances Asian American caregivers bring to the home-care context. Policies written to address community needs tend to omit the social circumstances many Asian American caregivers must face when trying to take advantage of programs and services. For example, the eligibility requirements fail to recognize distinctive cultural values embedded within the caregiving processes. Further, most Asian American data is aggregated. Aggregating data by ethnicity limits an accurate portrayal of social circumstances. The health effects developed from caregiving demands tend to remain unaddressed and the distribution of goods and essential services generally does not reach many home-based Asian American caregivers in need. This text examines a within-group perspective to uncover sociocultural dimensions influencing caregiving. Different perspectives include those of government and community agencies, research institutions, and data-driven websites (e.g., U.S. Census Bureau). Role Strain Theory and Role Enhancement Theory are discussed. This article explores critical issues such as the health impacts of caregiving demands, Asian American identity conflicts, and United States caregiving policy’s lack of acknowledgment of Asian American diversity. To begin making corrections to misleading assumptions about Asian Americans and their culture, the article closes with how researchers need to accept the heterogeneity of Asian Americans and provide a foundation for culturally appropriate policies and programs that can enhance caregivers’ quality of life.

Mel-han-cholia as Political Practice in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée

Turning to extant theories of melancholy, this article uses Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée to reevaluate the linear trajectory of Asian American identity formation in the United States. In particular, the author develops the term mel-han-choly—a hybrid form of melancholy and Korean han (a culturally specific grief)—to show how Cha uses it as a subversive political tool to defer historical closure and to refuse her quiet assimilation. Cha’s remembrance of the histories of Japanese colonialism in the Korean peninsula and the Korean War defies the expectation that minority populations somehow transcend their grievous pasts in becoming model American citizens. The author claims that Cha’s mel-han-cholic gestures disrupt the United States’ discursive power in narrating Korean history, especially as one contingent on accepting America’s “liberating” charge. This article also proposes that mel-han-choly serves a healing function within the diasporic Korean community, offering transnational connectivity through the shared experience of grief.

Asian American Mobilization and Political Identities

Immigrants from Asia have been a defining feature of demographic change over the last quarter century in the United States. The 2000 US Census identified Asian Americans as the fastest growing immigrant group in the nation and the Pew Research Center estimates that Asian Americans will become the largest immigrant group in the country by 2055. With that growth has come the development of a vibrant scholarly literature examining Asian American political participation in the United States. This article is designed to provide an overview of the major foundational studies that explore Asian American political behavior, including mobilization and participation in American politics. The earliest research began in the fields of political science and sociology and consider the viability of a panethnic Asian American identity as a unit of analysis for group-based behavior and political interests. Numerous scholars have considered the circumstances under which panethnic Asian American identity can be activated toward group behavior, and how differences in national origin can lead to variations in behavioral outcomes. Participation in American politics, however, is rooted in many other factors such as socioeconomics, one’s experience as an immigrant, ties to the home country, and structural barriers to activism. Individual resources have long been considered an essential component to understanding political participation. Yet, Asian Americans present a puzzle in American politics, evincing higher education and income while participating in politics at a more modest rate. In response to this puzzle, scholars have theorized that structural conditions and the experience faced by Asian immigrants are powerful mechanisms in understanding the determinants of Asian American political participation. Once considered to have relatively weak partisan attachment and little interaction with the two major parties in the United States, studies that examine the development of partisan attachment among Asian Americans are explored which, more recently, find that a growing majority of Asian Americans have shown a preference for the Democratic Party. Finally, we detail studies examining the conditions under which Asian American candidates emerge and are successful, the co-ethnic electorate who supports them, and conclude by detailing the opportunities and constraints for cross-racial collaboration and conflict.

“I Was Raised a Buddhist”: Tiger Woods, Race, and Asian-ness

Scholarly articles on Tiger Woods have attended to his mixed-race body through blackness and the refusal of his Asian heritage and identity. His Asian-ness was not part of the early marketing of his iconicity. In this paper, I looks at how Tiger Woods responded to the news of his marital affairs through a deployment of Buddhism. In particular, I theorize Asian/Asian American masculinity that engages with religion, Asia, Asian-ness, and Asian America to complicate theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Through the invocation of Buddhism, Tiger Woods offers a different racial heteronormativity that is legible in the nation and larger marketplace. In the process, he aligns with Asian and Asian American respectability as a way to temper blackness; it is an Asian and Asian American identity grounded in the rise of Asian capital and reconfigurations of both Asian and Asian American masculinity. Therefore, through Asian-ness, Woods offers an assemblage of religion, race, gender, and sexuality that silences and erases blackness.

The Role of Anthologies in Developing Approaches to The Study of Asian American Literature

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.