Asian American Literature

Abstract

An introduction to Asian American literary studies, this book simultaneously engages the conditions, contingencies, and immediate and long-term effects of its major debates. In doing so, it addresses two needs: first, to provide recognizable contours and trajectories for the evolution of Asian American criticism as an ethnic-specific minoritarian formation in the United States; second, to historicize its practices-including polemics, controversies, and ideological ruptures-as an ongoing negotiation undertaken by Asian American critics for a more self-conscious and more adequate representation of the field’s interests. The book’s introduction and conclusion contextualize the books aims and rationale, while the following eight chapters – organized non-chronologically – are each designed to reflect how the field has been energized by its demographic transformation, its growing intellectual heterogeneity, its defining moments, and its cross-cutting relationship with the trends in other disciplines.