Asian American Literary Studies Research Articles

“Beyond Railroads and Internment”? Japanese American Wartime Incarceration Literature and the Foundations of Asian American Literary Studies

Abstract This article sees post–World War II wartime incarceration literature as a multigenerational corpus and reassesses the handling of this material in Asian American literary criticism and cultural analysis. As a way of addressing the expanding corpus of wartime incarceration literature, which includes generations of descendant writers, the article proposes a cognitive mapping of the ten major spaces of Japanese American Wartime Relocation Authority (WRA) mass incarceration sites, which were built in spatial overlap or in geographic proximity to Native American historic sites of violent conflict and confrontation throughout the nineteenth century. It argues for the centrality of this intergenerational Japanese American corpus in Asian American and US literary and cultural studies, anchored as the body of work is in the historical trajectories of US imperialism and settler colonialism.

‘Beginning wherever you wish’: Sappho, Homer and the HomericHymn to Demeterin Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’sDictée

AbstractTheresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée expresses, in experimental and avant-garde form, the fragmented, disrupted and multilinguistic experiences of its author and her family against the tumultuous backdrop of twentieth-century Korean history. In the decades since its publication, the text has become established as a cornerstone of Asian American literary studies. This essay reads Dictée through the lens of its engagement with the ancient Greek classics, identifying how Cha responds to Sappho, Homer and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in the context of her subversive and irreverent poetics. It demonstrates the important role that the Western classical tradition plays in Dictée as a structural and communicative resource for Cha’s expression of her migratory identity as a Korean refugee in the United States. Cha engages with some of ancient Greece’s most canonical texts from a direction that is radically askew from the typical approaches of classical scholarship, mediated in part by twentieth-century writers like James Joyce and Monique Wittig, advancing understandings of classical material that are feminist, anti-imperial and non-Eurocentric. Dictée should be recognized not just as a landmark of Asian American literature, but also as one of the most original creative responses to Greco-Roman antiquity of the late twentieth century.

“A Handful of Syllables Thrown Back across the Water”:Dictée’s Aesthetic Legacy and Thai American Poetics

AbstractThis article draws on the formal and aesthetic qualities of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée as a critical model for theorizing the transnational legacies of colonialism and empire embedded in the acts of language learning and as an opening for Asian American literary studies to engage with the previously understudied genre of Thai American and Thai poetry. Foregrounding aesthetics and unique, translingual poetic practices, the readings in this article explore rich connections between Dictée and two experimental collections of Thai and Thai American poetry: Padcha Tuntha-obas’s trespasses (2006) and Jai Arun Ravine’s แล้วandthen entwine (2011a). Thai American cultural production is uniquely situated to offer aesthetic insights into the history of US presence in Southeast Asia from the mid-twentieth century onward, which in Thailand took the form of allyship and soft power as Thailand’s formally uncolonized status obscured the violent codifications of gender, racial, and sexual norms to align with Western, imperial worldviews. The author argues that, just as Dictée marked a revolutionary period in Asian American literary studies as the field grappled with the role of poststructural theory, experimental literary forms, and transnational, decolonial politics in the United States and Asia, a more sustained engagement with Thai American and Thai poetry can offer a critical entry point to address US informal empire building in Southeast Asia, including activities often occluded in mainstream historical narratives by a singular focus on Vietnam during the Cold War era.

On Dissonance and Its Functions in Asian American Criticism

Abstract Building upon recent work in Asian and Asian American studies, this essay explores dissonance, rather than disinterestedness, and its function and form for literary studies in our present time. It is inspired not only by my rereading of Matthew Arnold’s essay but also the convergence of key events over the course of the last few years, ranging from recent attention to Asian and Asian American cultural production to anti-Asian hate crimes. As an Asian Americanist, I research and teach in a field whose very emergence was tied to activist claims for institutional and disciplinary space. I therefore find it profoundly difficult to imagine our endeavors in American literary studies as “disinterested.” I am less invested in making the case whether or not the study of Asian American literature “matters”; rather, here I explore why Asian American literary studies—a method that seeks out and dwells in dissonance and urgency rather than disinterestedness and patience—might be a model worth continuing.

Minority Formalism, Aesthetic Concepts, and Chuang Hua’s Crossings

This essay engages philosophy of art, Adorno’s aesthetic theory, and Asian American literary studies to show that aesthetic concepts—terms describing the sensory, perceptual properties of a text—are crucial to theorizing minority formalism and minority aesthetic concepts. Using Adorno’s theory of substantial formalism to analyze Crossings (1968), a little-known Asian American novel, this essay shows that rather than being just adjectives describing the expressive qualities of a text or tropes describing its particular theoretical maneuvers, terms such as opaque, non-linear, fragmented, discordant, or dissonant are aesthetic concepts that exert political import through form.

The Role of Anthologies in Developing Approaches to The Study of Asian American Literature

The article reviews the role and position of the first anthologies of American literature written by writers of Asian descent, due to which the outlines for what are now commonly known as Asian American literary studies were defined. A close analysis of these anthologies enables to realize why the existence of a unified collective Asian American identity, which was proclaimed in the second half of the 20th century, is being questioned at the milestone of the 20th and 21st centuries. It gives reason to state that the anthologies did not only emphasize the status quo of literature created by American writers of Asian descent, but also formed fracture lines along which at the end of the 20th century efforts were made to deprive Asian-American literature of the status of marginal, secondary and present it as a full-fledged component of American literary continuum. The first one can be described as “beyond the hyphen”. The second trajectory of the search for a way out of ethnic shelter at the end of the 20th century is aimed at “reconfiguring the canon”. It involves not only a demand of being fully involved into the American literary tradition, but also a search for its role in shaping, if not generating contemporary American literature. The anthologies that hold the primacy in the discovery of American writers of Asian descent, as a literary fact on one side, were both a continuation and rethinking of the tradition of Eastern (Chinese/Japanese) anthologies. On the other hand, despite the extremely compressed theoretical foundation for the essence of this wing of American literature, they show the extent and dynamism of its understanding and interpretation as an integral part of Western literary discourse.

Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art by Susette Min

Reviewed by: Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art by Susette Min Jeanette Roan (bio) Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art, by Susette Min. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 272 pp. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9780814764305. Asian American art is a relatively new topic of scholarly inquiry. Works such as Why Asia? Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art (1998), Fresh Talk / Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (2003), Asian American Art: A History, 1850–1970 (2008), Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary (2009), Queering Contemporary Asian American Art (2017), and other contributions to the field have made visible a broad range of Asian American artists, offered compelling insights into their lives and works, and created a rich discourse of Asian American art history. Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art complements this body of work by asking us to consider the utility of the name “Asian American art.” The book begins by looking back at racial- and ethnic-specific exhibitions of the 2000s, in particular One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now (2006), curated by Melissa Chiu, Karin Higa, and Susette Min. In an essay included in the exhibition catalog, Min wrote of the necessity of “identity-based exhibitions” alongside the delimitations of existing curatorial frameworks. Unnamable expands upon these earlier reflections, situating the multicultural exhibitions of the 1990s [End Page 299] and the racial- and ethnic-specific exhibitions that followed in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. Min concludes, “The politics of naming art ‘Asian American’ at this historical juncture within an ethnic-specific exhibitionary framework subjugates or constrains the work, burdening it with a ready-made set of interpretations already embedded in the collective imagination” (27). While acknowledging the continuing underrepresentation of artworks by Asian Americans, Min seeks to move away from a “politics of recognition” to a “reformation of perception, reorienting the futurity of Asian American art” (18). Unnamable thus sets out to explore a “supplementary” way of showing and engaging with “Asian American art.” Min’s focus on curatorial strategies brings a new perspective to familiar questions of identity and difference, race and representation. The introduction asks, “How does one weigh a call and desire for inclusion against the very logic of neoliberal multiculturalism that will co-opt this inclusion?” (13). She looks to French philosopher Jacques Rancière and his theory of aesthetics and politics as a way of “foregrounding aesthetics to reconceptualize Asian American art” (20). Although Rancière has been prominent in discourses of contemporary art theory and criticism for at least the past decade, his work will likely be less familiar to scholars in Asian American studies. However, Min takes care to explicate key concepts, joining his thought to Lisa Lowe’s work to bring in a more familiar set of ideas. She also situates her work within a recent interest in the aesthetic in Asian American literary and cultural studies. Notably, Rancière also figures prominently in Kandice Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (2019). Chapter 1 demonstrates how exhibitions can shape the reception of artworks and offers insight into the challenges of showing work by Asian American artists within prevailing art world conventions and expectations by examining The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990), the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Asia/America (1994), and Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents (2008). The remainder of the book, conceived as “mini-exhibitions on paper and case studies,” presents critical analyses of the work of a handful of established artists: Tehching Hsieh, Byron Kim, Nikki S. Lee, Simon Leung, and Mary Lum (6). Each chapter is organized around themes that are familiar to Asian American studies even as the works themselves, selected for their conceptual richness and aesthetic strategies, do not directly “represent” these topics. Chapter 2 considers labor and Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance 1978–1979 (Cage Piece) and One Year Performance, 1980–1981 (Time Piece), Byron Kim’s Whitney Philip Morris: Wall Drawings (1999), and Simon Leung’s Squatting Project/Berlin (1994). Chapter 3 emphasizes space, history, and memory in selected works by Mary Lum alongside Simon Leung’s Surf Vietnam (1998). Unfortunately, the book does...

Reimagining Asian American literary studies in China

ABSTRACTThe study of Asian American literature has developed for almost two decades since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Inspired by Kuan-Hsing Chen’s “Asia as method,” which situates Asia at the center and uses Asian societies as each other’s points of reference, we use China as a site to reconsider how to read, teach and study Asian American literature in its new phase by exploring the following interactions: (1) between Asian American literature and American literature; (2) between Asian American literature and overseas Chinese literature; (3) between Asian American literature and Chinese literature. We encourage writers, readers and scholars to adopt Chen’s inter-Asia approach to rethink and reconsider the writing of Asian American subject, the study of Asian American literature, the inquiries made about it, and the methods of teaching it. We further expand it to include both a global perspective and a comparative approach that also uses national/regional literatures as reference points.

"It was Akiko 41; it was me": Queer Kinships in Nora Okja Keller's Mother-Daughter Narrative

Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman (1997) prioritizes the point of view of women to discuss the aftermath of war. The novel is centered on a mother-daughter relationship and scholars of Asian American literary studies often interpret the daughter's story line as a gendered legacy in which she inevitably inherits her mother's history of sexual traumas. In this article, I consider the role of queerness threaded throughout the novel's representations of World War II military outposts and Korean "comfort women," to argue that Korean American intergenerational models contain multiple sexualities as a result of Japanese colonialism and U.S. militarization.

Translational Form in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

Through a close reading of the tropes of interlingual and historical translation in Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel, A Tale for the Time Being, this essay argues that an attention to forms of translational work has important implications for transnational American studies, particularly in reorienting the field beyond its continental US and anglocentric bounds. Taking as its primary object of inquiry the “voluminous influx” of national, racial, and linguistic ‘otherness’ that David Palumbo-Liu describes as “a distinct feature of late twentieth century and early twenty first century age of globalization,” A Tale for the Time Being highlights translation’s central (and often acknowledged) role in shaping the ways in which that otherness is negotiated across geographical and temporal meridians. My reading of the novel’s translational form is twofold. I begin by considering the import of this intervention to the field of Asian American literary studies, focusing on how Ozeki mobilizes the formal elements of interlingual translation to push back against naturalizing conceptions of Asian / American identity. I then apply this translational framework to the divergent accounts of history in the novel, and argue that—by calling attention to the fissures and gaps in these narratives—Ozeki offers a new model of empathic reading, one that draws herself and her readers together through a logic of “not knowing.”

Guests of Empire, Ghosts of Dispossession: Traumatic Loss and the Subject without a Proper Name in The Gangster We Are All Looking For

Guests of Empire, Ghosts of DispossessionTraumatic Loss and the Subject without a Proper Name in The Gangster We Are All Looking For Yasuko Kase (bio) The strategy of not-naming raises some related questions about identity and the mechanisms of identification through which identity is ascertained and secured: In what ways does a name indicate presence? Must the absence of a name be linked to loss? —Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony What constitutes the outrage of the Holocaust—the very essence of erasure and annihilation—is not so much death in itself, as the more obscene fact that death itself does not make any difference, the fact that death is radically indifferent: everyone is leveled off, people die as numbers, not as proper names. In contrast to this leveling, to testify is to engage, precisely, in the process of re-finding one's own proper name, one's signature. —Shoshana Felman, "Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching" Vietnamese American writer lê thi diem thúy's first novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) has provoked discussions on the complicated politics surrounding the memory of the Vietnam War.1 According to Isabell Thuy Pelaud, for example, writings by Vietnamese refugees were "vivid reminders of either national guilt or the abuses perpetrated by leftist regimes—neither the American Right nor the Left were keen to hear Vietnamese American stories."2 Thus, even in the field of Asian American literary studies, Vietnamese American literature was long ignored because [End Page 71] of their positioning in relation to the conventional Leftist political formula, which idealizes "bad subjects," that is, resistant subjects.3 Since the mid-1970s, it can be argued, one basis of the US acceptance of Southeast Asian refugees was to create a cultural memory of the war based on US notions of hospitality. However, because of internal economic tensions and outward social hostility toward Southeast Asians who "embody" the war, the American public has often expressed displeasure and antagonism at receiving refugees. To achieve a smoother assimilation by easing these ambivalent feelings, the US public expected Vietnamese refugees to behave as versions of "good" refugees, principally by becoming economically self-sufficient, socially passive, and academically successful. This typical "model minority" stereotype, which most Asian American intellectuals have always disavowed, but the political conservatives often endorse, has long been attached to the image of Vietnamese refugees.4 "Good" Vietnamese refugees at one level appease US national war guilt and allow it to retrieve an illusionary return to "wholeness." In "Fetishism: The Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real" (referring to Freud's version of fetishism), Jacques Lacan and Wladimir Granoff argue that for the little boy who denies his difference from his mother and her "castration," fetishism operates in order to replace his mother's "absent" phallus.5 The fetish object covers up this loss by allowing the boy to maintain the misperception and turn away from his own fear of castration. With his attempt to maintain his dual relationship with his mother, he refuses or fails to enter the symbolic realm governed by the "Father." Similarly, the "good" refugees serve as "fetish" objects, allowing the United States to maintain a mode of social-political-psychical defense against the national castration/defeat, substituting the "lack" of "phallic" victory.6 In US official memory, the war should be remembered as a "heroic" war against communism to protect humanity, liberty, and democracy. "Good" Vietnamese refugees are often framed therefore to justify US Cold War ideology: they operate as proof that the United States can offer minorities social mobility and human rights. Thus, Vietnamese refugees have needed to behave as "idealized" guests, who follow what Jacques Derrida calls "the law of hospitality,"7 within the "symbolic order,"8 or the preexisting linguistic and cultural structure that constitutes and defines the subject. These guests should "politely" follow this "law," in exchange for receiving "conditional" hospitality. [End Page 72] "Proper" Vietnamese American writings should therefore conform to this "symbolic order" of the host country by accepting their assigned role as "good refugees." Conforming to the ideological fantasy of a version of the American Dream, "good refugees" need to accommodate...

The “Comfort” Of Critical Consolidation: Pedagogy, Ethical Alienation, and Asian American Literary Studies

Abstract This article proposes ethical alienation as a critical pedagogical practice by analyzing the neoteric critical consolidation of Asian American literary and cultural studies, a consolidation marked by the recent (and near simultaneous) publication of four major compendiums—The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature (Lee 2014), Keywords for Asian American Studies (Schlund-Vials, Vo, and Wong 2015), The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Parikh and Kim 2015), and The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (Srikanth and Song 2015). The publication of these four compendiums within the span of a year signals a pivotal moment in Asian American literary and cultural studies, one that both recognizes the institutional gains of the field and addresses the (in)compatibilities between the field’s theoretical developments and its pedagogical practices. This article considers the centrality of ethics to a postidentity Asian American studies, suggesting how ethical alienation—signaled both by the figuration of “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni and our own estrangement from it—can create productive classroom and metapedagogical practices in the study of Asian American literature. By attending to the field’s consolidations around a set of pedagogical and scholarly imperatives and analyzing that critical solidification in relation to “comfort women”/military sex slaves/halmoni both as a figuration of “complex personhood” (Gordon 1997, 4–5) and as an interdisciplinary “term of analysis and history rather than personhood” (Chuh 2003a, 9), this article argues that ethical alienation as pedagogical practice can lead us to a differently ordered set of disciplinary priorities.

Reconciling Asian-American Studies: Debt, Indebtedness, and Obligation

Reconciling Asian-American Studies: Debt, Indebtedness, and Obligation Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (bio) Duong, Lan. 2012. Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. $79.50 hc. $27.95 sc. 264pp. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2012. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. $84.95 hc. $23.95 sc. xvi + 276 pp. Ninh, erin Khuê. 2011. Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature. New York: New York University Press. $75.00 hc. $24.00 sc. vii + 207 pp. Etymologically drawn from the Latin term for “something owed” (debitum), “debt” strikes a decidedly familiar chord at the turn of the twenty-first century. Set alongside contemporary banking crises, financial meltdowns, and governmental bailouts, “debt” coheres with economically driven characterizations of cooperative culpability (particularly with regard to state regulation) and individual responsibility (e.g., subprime loans). Simultaneously, the condition of being in debt—“indebtedness”—can refer to monetary liability or assume a more personal register, signaling an affective obligation to another party or entity. This ancillary definition, in which pecuniary metaphor remains interchangeable with emotional bond, semantically coexists with “gratitude,” in which one is—by way of gift or favor—beholden to another. Notwithstanding divergent resonances and differential registers, “debt,” “indebtedness,” “gratitude,” and “obligation” are [End Page 182] relational terms that underscore associations between and among individuals and groups. This collective reading of “debt” fits the parameters of Asian-American studies as a now-established multidisciplinary field that was, from the outset, indebted to mid-century civil rights movements. Indeed, such movements vociferously and urgently emphasized the politicized obligation to reclaim and uncover histories of racialized oppression. The first generation of Asian Americanists recovered stories of immigration exclusion (for example, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act), racist incarceration (e.g., the Japanese-American internment), citizenship restriction (as exemplified by the 1922 naturalization case Ozawa v. United States), and political disenfranchisement. The field also owes—immediately and belatedly—a vexed debt to US foreign policy and shifts in immigration law. With regard to the former, twentieth-century American history lays bare longstanding engagements with and in Asia, emblematized by militarized interventions and occupations in the Philippines (1898–1946), Japan (1945–52), Korea (1950–53), and Southeast Asia (1959–75). In terms of the latter, the passage of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act (which eschewed nation-state immigration quotas in favor of East-West hemispheric designations) and subsequent refugee acts (in 1975 and 1980 respectively) enabled the first en masse migration of Asian immigrants to the United States. These histories, which to varying degrees brought Asian-American studies into being, operate as identifiable anchors for three recently published monographs: erin Khuê Ninh’s Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (2011), Lan Duong’s Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (2012), and Mimi Thi Nguyen’s The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (2012). Accessible to multiple audiences (including undergraduates, graduate students, and specialists), each work makes a considerable and commendable contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of Asian-American literary studies, Southeast Asian–American studies, and American cultural studies. In so doing, these projects highlight not only where such fields have been but also evocatively highlight where they are and should be going. To be sure, integral to Ingratitude, Treacherous Subjects, and The Gift of Freedom is a nuanced consideration of debt, indebtedness, and obligation. These theoretical evaluations—rooted in heterogeneous archives and manifest in variegated reading practices—productively render visible a flexible, debt-driven analytic that re-visions and recalibrates racialized legacies of immigration and war. As the full title of Ninh’s monograph suggests, Ingratitude concentrates its affective and intellectual attention on the second-generation “debt-bound daughter” in Asian-American literature. Whereas Ingratitude focuses its narrative attention on the invested filial obligations between immigrant parents and their female children, Duong’s Treacherous Subjects evaluates—via film and literature—the indebted intersectional relationship between race, gender, and nation. Guided by contradictory characterizations of Vietnamese subjects (including “over here” [End Page 183] refugees and “over there” nationals) as “collaborators” and “traitors” during and after the American War in Vietnam, Treacherous Subjects provocatively recalibrates the...

Rethinking Asian American Literary Studies

Rethinking Asian American Literary Studies

An overview of Korean/Asian American literary studies in Korea, 1964–2009

Seminal essays on Korean American writers were published in Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. But Asian American literary studies has been flourishing only from the 1990s thanks to Korean scholars' interest in overseas Korean literatures, the centennial of Korean immigration to the US in 2003, and the rise of Asian American literary studies in the US. An analysis of the articles and book-length studies shows the general trends of Asian American literary studies in Korea: Korean scholars are interested more in close readings of individual texts than in general, intraethnic, interethnic, and interracial studies; they prefer narratives to plays and poems; they focus on Korean American literature; they study not only Anglophone Korean American literature but also Korean-language American texts. Korean scholars' focus on Korean American literature significantly points at new directions in Asian American literary studies—towards broader, comparative, transnational, and translingual readings of Asian American texts. In conclusion, Korean scholars have actively participated in the international discursive networks of scholars interested in Asian American literature with their uniquely Korean perspectives.

"Ethnic Literature's Hot": Asian American Literature, Refugee Cosmopolitanism, and Nam Le's The Boat

This article examines The Boat as a coherent collection of stories that self-consciously takes up, in "Love and Honor," some central debates in Asian American literary studies: questions of cultural authenticity, authorial ownership, responsible representation of trauma, the selling out of the community by subsequent generations, and what constitutes Asian American literature and/or "ethnic literature." It argues that Le complicates the concept of ethnic literature through the middle stories of the collection by imbricating the ethnic with the cosmopolitan, two concepts that are usually viewed in opposition, to arrive at the idea of "refugee cosmopolitanism" in the final story, "The Boat."

The institutionalization of Asian American literary studies in Taiwan: a diasporic Sinophone Malaysian perspective

This paper aims to discuss the institutionalization of the studies of Chinese American literature/Asian American literature in Taiwan from the perspective of a Sinophone Malaysian, focusing on the motivation of local scholars to work on Chinese American or Asian American literary works. I argue that claiming that it is the ethnic, cultural and affective affinities that manifests the pertinency of Chinese American or Asian American literature as the object of study might fail to see the cultural heterogeneity and generational difference sitting in the racialized space within such texts. In reading Chinese American or Asian American literature, while a Taiwanese scholar might underline Asian affinities, a diasporic Sinophone Malaysian would stress the textual difference in linguistic medium and multiculturalism within the American context. Furthermore, it is significant to observe comparatively Sinophone literary texts of Chinese American or Asian American produced in Taiwan and Sinophone Malaysian literary works published in Taiwan.

Imagining a Transpacific and Feminist Asian American Archive

A brief moment in karen tei yamashita's recent novel i hotel (2010) resurrects a crucial fragment of asian american literary history. Yamashita's book—part send-up and part recounting of actual events—pays homage to and reimagines the multiple paths that were critical to the late-1960s and 1970s Asian American movement. In a small yet important scene, I Hotel highlights how the development of an Asian American literary canon was entwined with the production of heroic masculinity. Three men drive four hundred miles to visit Dorothy Okada, widow of the author John Okada, on a mission of archival recovery and masculinist “heroics” (96). Their adventure begins when one of the men discovers Okada's 1957 novel No-No Boy (now a canonical work) and a letter that mentions the possible existence of an unpublished manuscript by Okada. Ultimately, the trip is unsuccessful. “What happens next,” the narrator tells us, “is history” (97). Confronted by the lack of public interest in Okada's work, Dorothy has burned his papers, and the disappointed men can only ask ridiculously inappropriate questions about the couple's marriage and sexual relationship. In this story, the men who set out to become heroes of Asian American literary studies are thwarted by a woman's failure to preserve the text, and they reduce Dorothy to a supporting role. Yet in recapturing the gendered division at the heart of this defining moment in Asian American literary history, I Hotel also reminds us of other narrative, methodological, and theoretical paths. “As time drags on,” the narrator muses a few pages earlier, “other events step up to the plate, and one begins to wonder why any fork in the road presented the less traveled option” (95).

Asian American Literary Studies in China

The present paper is a survey of Asian American Literature studies in mainland China. Based on the investigation and analysis, the author argues that in the past decade, there have been great achievements made in China, with a lot of essays and books published and theses and Ph. D dissertations written. Asian American literary studies have become so thriving because of the joint efforts of publishing houses, research centers and universities. Although obvious accomplishments have been achieved, there remain many defects in the research.

Belonging Across Cultures: Immigration and Citizenship in A Free Life

Published in 2007, Ha Jin's A Free Life garnered attention from book critics as the first “American” novel written by the prolific Chinese-born author. This essay explores how A Free Life reimagines the relationship between culture and citizenship with which Asian American literary studies has long struggled, foregrounding how formal legal status is anything but secure for immigrant Asian Americans. The novel urges its reader to ask what is the cultural position and legal status of the immigrant subject who gives up identification with one nation for another, and, as a result, finds himself with no sense of identity or existential security from either.