Beyond Identity Politics: The Predicament of the Asian American Writer in Late Capitalism

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With the presumed collapse of the transcendental grounds for universal standards of norms and values, proponents of the postmodern revolution in cultural studies in Europe and North America have celebrated differance, marginality, nomadic and decentered identities, indeterminacy, simulacra and the sublime, undecidability, ironic dissemination, textuality, and so forth. A multiplicity of power plays and language games supposedly abounds. The intertextuality of power, desire, and interest begets strategies of positionalities. So take your pick. Instead of the totalizing master narratives of Enlightenment progress, postmodern thinkers valorize the local, the heterogeneous, the contingent and conjunctural. Is it still meaningful to speak of truth? Are we still permitted to address issues of class, gender, and race? What are the implications of this postmodern transvaluation of paradigms for literary studies in general and minority/ethnic writing in particular? One salutary repercussion has been the questioning of the Eurocentric canonical archive by feminists, peoples of color, dissenters inside and outside. The poststructuralist critique of the self-identical Subject (by convention white, bourgeois, patriarchal) has inspired a perspectivalist revision of various disciplinary approaches in history, comparative aesthetics, and others. To cite three inaugural examples: Houston Baker's text-specific inventory of the black vernacular blues tradition presented in Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (1984), Arnold Krupat's foregrounding of oral tribal allegory in American Indian autobiographies enabled by a materially situated historicism in The Voice in the Margin (1989), and Ramon Saldivar's dialectical assessment of Chicano narrative as an oppositional articulation of the gaps and silences in American literary history, a thesis vigor