Cultural Politics and Chinese-American Female Subjectivity: Rethinking Kingston' Woman Warrior

Abstract

Asian American cultural studies as part of US minority studies has witnessed an increasing interest in questioning formation of ethnic canon and critiquing institutional functions which some specific Asian American literary texts have performed in constituting curriculum of US literary and cultural studies. In her critique of canon and Asian American literature, Lisa Lowe argues that Asian American literary expression cannot be adequately evaluated in canonical terms because of its unequal material condition of production, and its contradictions in canonical sense should be deployed as moments to think about alternative subject formations, cultural identities, and critical positions. (1) In a postmodernist sense, Lowe suggests necessity of developing a new critical framework for Asian American cultural analyses, as well as importance of intervening in aesthetics and ideologies of dominant canon from that vantage point. Meanwhile, in her case study of what she calls Amy Tan phenomenon, (2) Sauling Wong examines circumstances which have conditioned and produced Tan's popularity and considers her success as compliance with changing ideologies and demands of dominant culture. Arguing that Tan mediates and repackages Orient for a white readership, Wong calls for a new Asian American canon which should be independent of Orientalist interests and concerns. As interest in Asian American canon evolves, critical attention has also turned towards Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, a text which, since its publication in 1976, has not only been focus of a major controversy and extensive scholarship in Asian American studies, but also earned credit in academy as the most widely taught book by a living writer in US colleges and universities(Talbot, qtd. in Li, 8). In a recent analysis of The Woman Warrior, Sheryl Mylan observes that Kingston unwittingly constructs an Orientalist framework in her book to differentiate herself from her mother and Chinese culture and, in process, duplicates ideologies and problematics of US dominant culture. By same token, in reconsidering Kingston's work, David Li suggests that The Woman Warrior has served as a means of contesting power between dominant culture and ethnic community; its value lies precisely in foregrounding representational issues that have accompanied growth of Asian American creative and critical production (Imagining 62). The tendency to reconsider Kingston's work has also extended to critical studies of Kingston. Tomo Hattori argues that feminist psychoanalytical interpretations of The Woman Warrior, as exemplified by Leslie Rabine's reading of Kingston, are usually preoccupied with an Orientalist unconsciousness which privileges Western cultural traditions and historical developments as standard, and construes Asian and Asian American social realities only as a psycholinguistic function within a Western process of psychic, cultural, and no doubt moral redemption(133). Such an interpretative approach, Hattori concludes, demonstrates appropriations of minority culture by dominant US cultural and failures of critical theory in considering minority discourses in their own terms and contexts (133). The critique of Orientalist disposition both inside and outside of text of The Woman Warrior has revived decade-long controversy over Kingston, which was first formulated along lines of autobiographical accuracy, cultural authenticity, and ethnic representativeness. Often loosely defined as cultural nationalists, (3) Jeffery Chart, Benjamin Tong, and Frank Chin, among others, accused Kingston of distorting Asian American reality on one hand, and catering to demand of dominant culture for exoticism and stereotypes on other. Chin not only continues to caricature Kingston's work as the fake, but also challenges her very use of autobiographical form, arguing that autobiography with its basis in Western metaphysical tradition and Christian confession would never capture sensibility or imagination of Chinese America. …