The Americas of Asian American Literature

Abstract

Rachel Lee examines four major prose works by Bulosan, Jen, Hagedom, and Yamashita through the lens of gender with an additional focus on national or transnational identity. In her introduction, Lee astutely asserts While Asian Americanists debate the political, cultural, and social consequences of reconstituting Asian America's geopolitical borders in international, transnational, and postnational terms, gender in Asian American literary studies is, to a large degree, mired in a nationalist problematic. Indeed, many of us who identify ourselves as Feminist Asian Americanists may feel a tinge of embarrassment at how much our work over the past decade has been at least partially in response to the debate centered around Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston, a debate begun almost a quarter of a century ago. As Lee notes, some good has come out of this debate: cultural nationalism, in making broadly public and starkly visible a sexism internal to the community, enabled the emergence of a certain type of gender criticism, one that stressed the dual and interlocking oppressions of racism and sexism visited on Asian American women. However, Lee warns, An unforeseen downside to this close association of Asian American feminism with a critique of nationalism is that as the authority of the latter wanes so does the urgency of this type of gender criticism (10). Lee provides a strong addition to the struggle to assert gender's importance in the ongoing discussion of national and transnational identity. Lee's chapter on gender and homosocial bonds in Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart ably follows the plan outlined in the introduction as it reveals gender and sexuality to be not peripheral but integral to Bulosan's definition of national identities. Although many critics have mentioned gender and sexuality in their analyses of Bulosan, particularly his representation of white women, I have not been able to locate another published work that