Asian American Literature Research Articles

Celeste Ng in Conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston: Intergenerational Trauma and the Asian American Experience in Everything I Never Told You.

This paper delves into the representation of intergenerational trauma within Asian American literature, focusing on Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and the critiques by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Ng’s work is analyzed for its nuanced portrayal of trauma as an intrinsic part of the Asian American experience, distinguishing it from earlier works that, as Nguyen argues, tend to conform to the “model minority” stereotype. The paper examines Ng’s sensitive unpacking of trauma, particularly its non-punctual, systemic nature, and its intergenerational transmission, especially in parent-child relationships. Additionally, it contrasts Ng’s approach with Kingston’s, exploring how trauma in The Woman Warrior is masked by cultural reinterpretation and the desire to please dominant Western narratives. By employing the theories of Cathy Caruth, Naomi Mandel, and Greg Forter, the essay argues that Ng repositions trauma as a core theme in Asian American literature, filling a significant gap left by previous works and redefining the narrative of Asian American identity and heritage.

Reform or Revolution? Socialism from China to Asian Communities

“This article examines socialist ideologies in Asian American literature by comparing Karen Tei Yamashita's I-Hoteland H.T. Tsiang's And China Has Hands. Despite both novels centering on Chinese American experiences in the 20th century, they offer differing perspectives on socialism influenced by the authors' backgrounds and historical contexts. Tsiang's work, set in 1930s New York, portrays socialism as an experimental pursuit for Chinese revolutionaries amidst the clash between socialism and nationalism. Conversely, Yamashita's I-Hotel, set in 1960s and 1970s San Francisco, depicts Asian American characters influenced by Maoist socialist ideology, tempered by disillusionment with the Cultural Revolution. Through close analysis, the article examines how each author navigates characters' attitudes towards socialism. In I-Hotel, Yamashita critiques the Cultural Revolution's suppression of art and literature, exposing Maoist authoritarianism. Meanwhile, Tsiang's optimism towards socialism is reflected in characters like Fellow, expressing a longing for reform and unity within the proletariat. Both authors' personal experiences and historical contexts shape their narratives. Tsiang's immersion in New York City's political landscape during the early 20th century informs his advocacy for socialist reform. Similarly, Yamashita's upbringing in a Japanese American family during World War II informs her critique of authoritarianism and advocacy for equitable socialism. In conclusion, this comparative analysis highlights diverse interpretations of socialism in Asian American literature, emphasizing the interplay between personal experiences, historical contexts, and ideological frameworks. Through their narratives, Yamashita and Tsiang offer reflections on the potentials and pitfalls of socialist ideologies, urging readers to engage critically with questions of revolution and social justice.”

To Know Every Part: Theorizing Craft Narratives Via Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone

Published nearly thirty years ago, Fae Myenne Ng’s debut novel, Bone, has become a canonical work of Asian American literature for its domestic portrayal of a multi-generational Chinese American family. This article demonstrates how fiction offers a means to theorize contemporary craft. As the daughter of a seamstress, Ng utilizes her own intimate knowledge of industrial and domestic sewing to develop the emotions and intergenerational memories of characters in the novel. In doing so, Bone locates crafting subjects, their work and the handmade objects themselves within a legacy of Chinese exclusion and the ongoing racialized and gendered labor exploitation of Chinese immigrants. In this context, the fictional narrative pushes craft theorists and practitioners alike to instigate essential questions about what registers as craft and the role of narrative in this process. In particular, I focus on a persistent binary of handmade and mass-produced that shapes many dominant narratives of craft. By attending to this binary, we may analyze how dominant narratives actively make use of and reconfigure social constructs like gender and race to elicit certain perceptions (wittingly or unwittingly) about craft, craftspeople, their labors, and the value placed upon them.

“Going Back to the Basement” A Roundtable on Creativity, Critique, and the Stewarding of Asian American Literary Arts

ABSTRACT This roundtable features writers, scholars, editors, and organizers who are invested in Asian American literature. The conversation touched on literary history, the convergence of creative writing and critique, and the importance of grass roots programs and organizing.

Why Don't South Asians in the U.S. Count As “Asian”?: Global and Local Factors Shaping Anti‐South Asian Racism in the United States*

In a 2020 U.S. survey, more Asian Indians than Chinese indicated that they were worried about post‐Covid‐19 hate crimes. Yet, post‐Covid violence against people of Asian background has been viewed as being directed against “Chinese‐looking” individuals. This is just one example of how South Asians are overlooked in discourses about Asian Americans. This theoretical paper provides an expansion of the racial formation framework to explain this exclusion. We demonstrate how global factors, including the foreign engagements of the United States shaped the development of the Asian American group and category, and why, even though Asian Americans can be brown, yellow, white, or black, an East Asian phenotype is viewed as denoting an “Asian” body in the United States. We also discuss how the racialization of religion shapes anti‐South Asian racism, a factor largely ignored in the literature on racial formation and Asian Americans. We end by calling for the inclusion of South Asians in Asian American literature to challenge many of the reigning paradigms regarding Asian America and anti‐Asian racism.

An Ocean of Becoming: Routed Motherhood in Lisa Ko’sThe Leavers

AbstractIn Lisa Ko’s award-winning novel The Leavers (2017), protagonist Polly Guo is a leaver, sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice. From the shores of the Minjiang to the bridges of the Harlem River, from the waters of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific, Polly wanders the globe with and without her son but always through and with the water. As such, Polly becomes a rare and pronounced example in Asian American literature of a mother-in-transition—or what we are calling the routed mother. As a routed mother, Polly attempts to use physical movement to escape the containment of heteropatriarchal, capitalist understandings of what it means to be a successful mother. Bringing oceanic studies into conversation with the socioeconomic context of Asian American motherhood, this paper argues that waterways highlight—albeit messily, muddily, shiftingly, much like water itself—the sources and strategies of Polly’s containment as a mother and her resistance to that containment. Simultaneously, water reveals Polly’s failure to do so but recasts that routing in a paradigm beyond the dichotomy of success and failure. Ultimately, this article argues that Polly’s story as a routed mother offers an important oceanic counternarrative of motherly success.

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

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.

CRITICAL RACIAL LITERACY AWARENESS THROUGH AMERICAN LITERATURE: APPLYING THE SYNECTICS MODEL

This study is aimed at describing the literature learning process through a Synectics Gordon teaching model in a class of Literary Appreciation. It is projected to promote literacy through implied and embedded values, particularly in regard to critical racial literacy through Asian American literature. This case study involves a lecturer and students in a Literary Appreciation course in an English department. The data were collected through observations and interviews. The implemented stages of the Synectics teaching model are: Describing the topic, Describing personal analogies, Identifying compressed conflicts, and Re-examining the original topic. Due to the time constraint, only one stage—Creating a new direct analogy—was elicited. The results suggest that the reading strategies i.e., shared reading aloud and visualization, enhanced students’ understanding of the story and elicit powerful emotions about the literary work. The findings of the study also imply that Gordon's Synectics model aids in raising students' awareness of racism and other associated social issues by allowing them to put themselves in the shoes of persons from various racial origins. Implementing the same method, this study recommends adapting local/ national literature in varied classrooms.

PROSPECT OF ASIAN AMERICAN BOOK TO MOVIE ADAPTATIONS IN THE HOLLYWOOD ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY

This paper explores the prospects of Asian American book-to-movie adaptations in the Hollywood industry. There have been a large number of book-to-movie adaptations in the history of the American film industry, such as Great Expectation (1946), The Silence of the Lamb (1991), and The Great Gatsby (2013) to mention just a few. Some have also been reported to gain fame and economic success in the global film market. The mentioned book-to-movie adaptations were based on Western authors. Meanwhile, history has witnessed the emergence of Asian American writers such as: Bharati Mukherjee, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Anchee Min, among others who have played an essential role in the field of American literature. This paper uses a qualitative method by analyzing data from selected Book-to movie adaptations. It is evident that some of them received prestigious awards. Tan’s book-to-movie adaptation The Joy Luck Club (1993), Hosseini’s book-to-movie adaptation The Kite Runner (2007) and Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians (2018) have entered Hollywood to participate in the extremely competitive film market. The study results show that Asian American writers have emerged recently. Second, Asian American book-to-movie adaptations offer unique narratives to American audiences, although only a handful of Asian American book-to-movie adaptations have been produced. In conclusion, despite the promising growth of Asian American literature, readers can realize that Asian American book-to-movie adaptations have to struggle to be able to tap into the Hollywood industry.

Creativity and Critique in Asian American Literature: From Juxtaposition to Articulation

ABSTRACT This essay introduces Amerasia Journal’s special issue on “Creativity and Critique in Asian American Literature.” Drawing upon multi-genre and multimodal contributions to this issue, we theorize different ways of joining creative and critical modes, offering five suppositions as to what this articulation enables for Asian American representation; autobiography and art; embodiment and living archives; generic, epistemological, and structural boundaries; as well as collaborative care and stewardship of Asian American literary and creative arts. In conversation with the contributors, we reflect on creative-critical convergences and how they transform the broader social and ethical ecosystem of Asian American literature.

Once Upon a Queer Time in Krys Lee’s “Beautiful Women”

ABSTRACT Krys Lee’s “Beautiful Women,” published in Drifting House, follows the coming of age of Mina. The story juxtaposes the fairy tale and the bildungsroman which, impelled by Mina’s queer erotics, allows for an alternative, queer temporality to emerge. Mina’s queer imagination disrupts normative temporalities, illustrating what is possible when the junctures between queer theory and Asian Americanist critique are centered in Asian American literature. I argue that “Beautiful Women” depicts queer time as a new way of imagining a queer racialized futurity that is not yet realized, outside of the real and fantasy worlds, and beyond the collection’s pages.

Visual Notetaking as Asian American Art Practice

ABSTRACT This autoethnographic essay and curation of visual notes and illustrations sheds light on the transformative power of visual notetaking as Asian American art practice. I focus on the influence the field of Asian American studies has had on my life in developing my critical consciousness and the way in which my activist practice remains grounded in sharing Asian American stories through creative forms of Asian American literature such as visual notes.

‘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.

Knowledge in movement: configuring Asian American studies in Asian classrooms

ABSTRACT This article takes classrooms as crucial sites to explore the critical challenges and opportunities arising from Asian American studies’ relocation to Asia. Taking a cue from Erin Manning’s theory on “the minor gesture,” I conceive classroom dialogism as operating not as much to pass on inured thoughts as to generate “minor” forces that push knowledge into movement. Specifically, I argue that the confrontations and encounters of various nationalist, culturalist and imperialist perspectives—which usually contribute to the differences and difficulties of teaching Asian American studies in Asia—may be taken less as obstructions than as “minor” activators that push for renewed knowledge structures. Section one of this article reads selected teaching accounts to not only highlight the implications of Asian classrooms’ readings of Asian American texts in the power dynamics between Asia(s) and America(s), but also excavate from students’ readings and responses the habitual models of receiving Asian American studies in Asia. Section two then turns to my experience of teaching an undergraduate Asian American literature course in Taiwan to explore classrooms’ potential to usher in the time and space needed for opening habitual thinking paradigms into movement and variation. By mobilizing in classroom switches and exchanges between thinking positions and interpretive frames, I invoked from the documentary film Voices in the Clouds (2010) the intersecting life stories of Atayal, Han Taiwanese, Asian Americans and Americans to underscore the importance to think in terms of historical change and human movements.

What Comes after #StopAsianHate? Asian American Feminist Speculation

Abstract: Growing Asian American abolition feminisms is a practice not only of politics, organizing, and struggle, but of imagination, and speculative fiction and poetry can work to inspire and sustain such imaginations. Speculative and experimental works also challenge conventions of literary realism in Asian American literature, opening generic and imaginative possibilities for Asian American feminist politics. Responding to the threats of police violence and of racialized violence against Asian North American women, Franny Choi’s queer feminist cyborg poetics open space beyond the violences of the human, and Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir bends space and time to join trans women’s community together in ease and safety. Vandana Singh’s utopias of the third kind locate utopic thinking in the struggles of oppressed and racialized people to build and sustain community through slowness and connection. Together, these speculations consider Asian American feminist futurities and what ways of being-otherwise we can share in the present and future, shaped by connection, community, and care, rather than urgency, scarcity, and fear. Analyzing how these works respond to violence and crisis, this article describes abolitionist possibilities for Asian American feminisms that respond to anti-Asian and state violence by seeking other genres of human life and rejecting linear notions of progress. Instead, these texts cultivate connection and community in the present as a project of shaping Asian American utopic visions, rethinking utopia not as a vision of future perfection, but an ethic of embracing and negotiating change, difference, and multiplicity.

“Junk You Can't Abandon”: Hoarding and Waste in Andrew Lam and Karen Tei Yamashita

In the last decades a concern with waste has started to “surface” not just in the economic and social sciences, but also in the humanities, where it has lately clustered around Waste Studies and Waste Theory. This critical approach allows us to grapple with the consequences of our globalized economy of waste for both the planet and human beings. Although Waste Theory can be applied to virtually any literary tradition, I would argue that Asian American literature, which has been read along the lines of the waste/no-waste dialectics since Sau-ling Wong developed her Necessity/Extravagance thesis in 1993, proves particularly amenable to this methodology. In order to illustrate the multiple ways in which Waste Theory can productively interbreed with Wong’s dichotomy, I will explore the dynamics of hoarding and waste in Andrew Lam’s Perfume Dreams and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Sansei and Sensibility.

Excerpt from Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures

From Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures, by Erin Suzuki, pages 1-5. Used by permission of Temple University Press. © 2021 by Temple University. All Rights Reserved. Publisher website: https://tupress.temple.edu/books/ocean-passages

Asian-Indigenous Relations across Hemispheres, Oceans, and Islands

Asian-Indigenous Relations across Hemispheres, Oceans, and Islands Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (bio) Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas. By Quynh Nhu Le. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. 250 pages. $99.50 (cloth). $39.95 (paper). Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements. By Juliana Hu Pegues. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 232 pages. $95.00 (cloth). $32.95 (paper). Ocean Passages: Navigating Pacific Islander and Asian American Literatures. By Erin Suzuki. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021. 268 pages. $110.50 (cloth). $39.95 (paper). How do we make sense of Asian-Indigenous relations across settler colonial states? In what ways have Asian-Indigenous entanglements been structured by militarism, settler colonialism, and liberal empire? In 2000, the Kanaka Maoli scholar-activist Haunani-Kay Trask coined the term "settlers of color" to describe nonwhite, non-Indigenous communities in Hawai'i who, even as they bear the brunt of labor exploitation and racial exclusion, are structurally implicated in the ongoing dispossession of Native Hawaiians.1 In particular, Trask pinpointed East Asian Americans' rise to key positions of power in the Democratic Party following statehood, marking their direct responsibility for policies that uphold the occupation of the illegally overthrown Hawaiian Kingdom. In response, Asian American scholar-activists in and from Hawai'i such as Candace Fujikane, Jonathan Okamura, and Dean Itsuji Saranillio have developed the field of Asian settler colonialism studies, which seeks to grapple with Asian American attachments to the settler state even as it demands forms of ethical accountability and Asian-Indigenous solidarity, as theorized by Fujikane's term "settler ally."2 Moving beyond the context of Hawai'i, other American studies scholars have offered different key terms and concepts for attending to Asian-Indigenous relations in the wake of war, settler colonialism, and migration. The Chickasaw [End Page 1067] scholar Jodi Byrd's concept of the "transit of empire" illuminates how the imperial United States "made Indian" those lands and peoples it sought to conquer, replicating the so-called Indian Wars across Turtle Island with the wars of military occupation and empire building across Oceania and Asia.3 "Settler imperialism"—Byrd's term for the concomitant processes of settler colonialism and imperialism—displaced Asian subjects onto Indigenous lands and waters, necessitating the terms "arrivant," which Byrd borrows from the Caribbean writer Kamau Brathwaite, and "arrivant colonialism" to index the distinct contours of nonwhite migrants' implication in the ongoing displacement and dispossession of Native peoples.4 As such, Byrd insists that we attend to the "cacophonies" of colonialism: the chaotic, often contradictory ways that settler imperialism positions racialized and Indigenous communities in relation.5 Engaging Marxist theory and homing in on the racialization of Asian laborers in the North American context, Iyko Day proposes that the position of "arrivant" can be more precisely articulated as the "alien"—a migrant positionality marked for exploitation and exclusion that is nonetheless complicit in Indigenous displacement and dispossession via a logic of settler colonial capitalism.6 Gesturing more expansively, Lisa Lowe's Intimacies of Four Continents takes late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European liberalism as a point of departure for thinking about how British imperialism, settler colonialism across the Américas, the transatlantic slave trade, and Asian labor migration are entangled, both historically and in the contemporary moment.7 Her book offers "intimacy" as a reading practice, heuristic, and methodology for relational ethnic studies projects. The three books discussed here build on these relational studies of Asian-Indigenous entanglements in new and exciting ways. They engage literature, photography, history, and law to think through Asian and Indigenous proximities and affinities across multiple geographies of mutual encounter: the Américas, Alaska, and Oceania. Although sharply attentive to how settler colonialism, liberal empire, and racial capitalism shape Asian-Indigenous relations, collectively these books engage aesthetic cross-representations, shared intimacies, and imaginative possibilities that move us beyond binary oppositions and political impasses. In this way, the books are deeply feminist and hopeful in their orientations and commitments. All three theorize space in relation to time, offering conceptual tools that emerge from specific sociohistorical contexts yet can travel and be taken up in new directions. Although anchored in...

Felling the Canon: Classical Roots and Anti-Genealogies in Monica Youn's Blackacre

This article analyzes the use of classical references in Monica Youn's collection Blackacre. Inspired by rhizomatic models of classical reception studies, my reading focuses on the relationship between classical references in the body of the poems, on the one hand, and classical references in the paratexts on the other hand. I argue that Youn's oblique engagement with classical material exposes the limitations of an arborescent or genealogical model of reception and, on a related note, the constraints imposed by the construct of the canon as Youn leverages the heterogeneity of Asian American literature to resist the idea of a simple, hierarchical, one-way classical canon.

“My body is its image, here”: Diasporic Identity and the Deconstruction of Binary Division in 21st Century Asian American Poetry

This paper examines the poems of Franny Choi and Victoria Chang within the context of Asian American poetry, poetics, and criticism. It demonstrates how Choi and Chang’s work engage in a destabilization of binaries in order to rewrite and re-construct Asian American identity. A close reading of Choi’s “Chatroulette” from her collection, Soft Science, and Chang’s “Home” from her collection, Obit, reveals disruptions of five binary divisions, broadly identified as “high” poetic form and “low” poetic form, Eastern and Western, English and non-English, embodiment and disembodiment, and past and present. This paper argues that the deconstructions of these five binaries represent a search for belonging in the context of Asian American identity, as it is an identity that itself transverses the boundaries of “Asian” and “American.” This is supported by scholars of Asian American literature such as Michael Leong, Brigitte Wallinger-Schorn, and Zhou Xiaojing, who investigate how Asian American poets navigate alterity and cultural hybridity through innovation. It concludes by examining questions of home and belonging, theorizing that, for Asian American poets, reinventing language in a way that transgresses binaries and dichotomies allows for the construction of a new “home” that accepts the indeterminacies of identity, life, and death rather than resisting them.