Semiperipherality and the Taiwanese American Novel

Abstract

Abstract: While Asian American authors have certainly produced narratives of return to their or their predecessors' countries of origin, these narratives have, until recently, predominantly appeared in memoir and autobiography. Since the turn of the millennium there's been a significant uptick in the fictional portrayal of return. In stark contrast to the spiritual and filial returns in memoir, these fictional portrayals tend not to sentimentalize return. The protagonists who return more often follow economic or professional trajectories. In novels like Tao Lin's Taipei (2013), Ling Ma's Severance (2018), Han Ong's The Disinherited (2004), Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Brian Ascalon Roley's American Son (2001), and Lucy Tan's What We Were Promised (2018), return to Asia intensifies rather than vitiates material structures of alienation. What we find is that they tend to undermine an emerging Twenty-first century racial form that welds the Asian to neoliberal flexibility, even if they often forego critique. This article will describe contemporary Asian/American return fictions in contrast to earlier manifestations of the genre and explore their problematic relationship to categories like Asian American and Anglophone Asian fiction.