Generic Sui Generis

Abstract

Even before opening its covers, there is something always already very familiar about a novel by an Asian American writer. Its reception from both popular and critical audiences is likely to be preceded by presumptions about its writer, its subject matter, its prose style, and, most significantly, the information it will provide about the culture and history of the particular Asian group with which the author is affiliated. For Asian American writers, the “text” that precedes them is the immigrant narrative, for the reigning assumption of the mainstream literary market is that works by Asian American writers are de facto immigrant narratives, whether or not immigration is the principal subject of the works. As a result, Asian American writing, fiction and nonfiction alike, has become a veritable genre with its own set of conventions, exemplifying what Fredric Jameson describes as texts that “come before us as the always-already-read” as well as the “always-already-written.”1 From the writer’s perspective, such audience assumptions and habits in turn translate into implicit but powerful imperatives that shape their narrative choices and strategies. Asian American writers, then, are subject to the demands of what I call the “autobiographic imperative,” an interpretive disposition of readers who habitually read fiction by ethnic writers as autobiography, as testimonies to lived experiences, typically assumed to be those of immigrants.