Asian American Literature Research Articles

Asian American Literature and Reading Formations:

ABSTRACT: Since the 1970s, literature by Asian American women writers has made a significant impact on the American literary canon. But despite these gains, this article argues that the reception of Asian American literature is limited not only by aesthetics and literary value, but by several factors specific to the perceived racial and national identity of its authors or characters. Through a reception study of two novels by Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman and Fox Girl, Layfield argues that a positive reception of Asian American women's literature depends on several key factors: first, readers want to experience the situation of Asian women; second, the story of this “other” needs to be told in a familiar structure associated with Asian American literature, such as the mother-daughter tale; and finally, this story needs to conform to successful immigration stories in which the heroine reaffirms the importance of the nuclear family and portrays immigration to the United States as a means of salvation.

Articulating the Exodus: Place and Memory in Vietnamese-American Women Writers’ Novels

This paper aims to negotiate the conceptual tensions within and between “memory” and “place.” To address the differing terrain of complex nexus between place, memory and emotion, the paper explores three Vietnamese American autobiographical novels, Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (1997), Dao Strom’s Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003); and le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) to investigate the significance of spatial rhetorics, affect, and locational politics in the constructions of memories. The paper acknowledges the fact that not only temporal but also spatial dimensions structure identifications. “Geopolitics of memory” will be argued in this paper to highlight the politics of location characterized by the rhetoric of borders, interstices, and especially mobility. As an endeavor to explore Asian American literary texts from a more productive perspective, this paper will argue that research on transnationality needs to focus beyond material flows, to move to the “non-material” conditions which underpin and foster transnational networks and identities. Affective attachment, affective spatialities and transnationality, for example, are areas of studies in need of further investigation. This paper will ultimately highlight the way that these Vietnamese American women writers narrate about the pasts provide sites for examining relationships between national locations, transnational linkages, affective mapping and memory, which is where some of the crucial contemporary issues converge.

Etiology beliefs moderate the influence of emotional self-control on willingness to see a counselor through help-seeking attitudes among Asian American students.

To identify correlates of Asian American professional help-seeking, we tested a mediation model describing Asian American help-seeking (Asian value of emotional self-control → help-seeking attitudes → willingness to see a counselor; Hypothesis 1) in a sample of Asian American college students from the Pacific Northwest region of the United States (N = 232). We also examined biological and spiritual etiology beliefs as moderators of the mediation model (Hypotheses 2a and 2b). Our findings indicated that help-seeking attitudes significantly mediated the relation between emotional self-control and willingness to see a counselor, consistent with our mediation hypothesis. Furthermore, biological and spiritual etiology beliefs moderated this mediation model, providing partial support for our moderation hypotheses. Our findings suggest that researchers can contribute to the Asian American literature by investigating conditions in which established Asian American help-seeking models may or may not hold. In addition, the findings suggest additional nuanced ways for counselors to reach out to Asian American students to increase their mental health service utilization.

The Routledge companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander literature

The Routledge companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander literature

The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life the Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of US and Chinese Multiculturalisms

Book Review| December 01 2014 The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life the Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of US and Chinese Multiculturalisms The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American. By Song, Min Hyoung. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. 2013. 284 pp. Cloth, $84.95; paper, $23.95; e-book, $23.95.Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life. By Lee, Yoon Sun. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2013. ix, 226 pp. Cloth, $78.00; e-book available.The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature. By Lee, Christopher. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press. 2012. xi, 191 pp. Cloth, $50.00; e-book, $50.00.Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of US and Chinese Multiculturalisms. By Jin, Wen. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. 2012. xvii, 224 pp. Cloth, $52.95; CD, $14.95. Mark Chiang Mark Chiang Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2014) 86 (4): 844–847. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2811694 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Mark Chiang; The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life the Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of US and Chinese Multiculturalisms. American Literature 1 December 2014; 86 (4): 844–847. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-2811694 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Duke University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Human rights and the literary self-portrait: Vann Nath's A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21

This essay examines Vann Nath's memoir A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21 as a historical genre enjoined to Cambodia's contemporary human rights movement. Exemplifying Tzevetan Todorov's assertions about new genre formation, Nath's text functions as what I term a human rights literary self-portrait. While the literary self-portrait has been associated with a Western tradition of autobiography that chronicles the life and development of the autonomous artist (Beaujour 1991. Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait. New York: New York University Press; Soussloff 1997. The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), Cambodian life writing has been focused on bearing witness to war crimes and to engaging the attention of the international community (Yamada 2005. Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, edited by Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi, 144–167. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press). Simultaneously an introspective reflection on the life of an artist and a politicized act of inscribing collective history, Nath's memoir illustrates the way in which life narratives and human rights campaigns can operate, in the words of Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, as ‘multidimensional domains that merge and intersect at critical points, unfolding and unfolding one another in an ethical relationship that is simultaneously productive of claims for social justice and problematic for the furtherance of this goal’ (Schaffer and Smith. 2004. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2).

The Asian American Writing Movement and Black Radicalism

This article reconsiders the genesis and formation of Asian American literature by focusing less on the Chin-Kingston debate and more on the impact of Black radicalism and the genre of antiracist anthologies. I explore Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers and Yardbird Reader 3 to examine the centrality of Black cultural revolution for the rise of Asian American literature, and the works of multiethnic anthologies within cultural nationalisms and emergent multiethnic movements. During the post–civil rights era of racial realignment, Black radical thought is the counterpoint to forced Asian ethnic assimilation; this Asian-Black sensibility had challenged an uncritical complicity with white supremacy, which had suppressed Black revolution and modeled Asian America. In Aiiieeeee!, the editors use the vernacular languages, performance styles, and oppositional consciousness of Black masculinity as a means to expose the contradictions of post–civil rights racial formations that disunite Asian and Black communities. In Yardbird Reader 3, the institutional and homosocial bonds between Ishmael Reed and Frank Chin became a crucial relationship to solidify the Asian American Writing Movement and multiethnic collaborations through Afro-Asian connections. Both works carved a niche in U.S. national culture by conceptualizing new models of multiethnicity and subsequently birthed a germinal literary sensibility.

American Rules and Chinese Faces: The Games of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club

The sensational commercial success of Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), and the book’s subsequent cultural ubiquity led Karl Taro Greenfeld of The Paris Review to comment recently that “if Oprah Winfrey had had a book club in 1989 she surely would have selected it” (13). Yet it is perhaps precisely because that powerful arbiter of middlebrow taste did not yet exist that The Joy Luck Club became as much of a sensation as it did, for in many ways, the book club and the novel fulfill similar functions. Just as Oprah’s Book Club has been lauded for its remarkable ability to transform obscure novels into overnight bestsellers and expose its largely white middleto upper-class female demographic to a plethora of so-called minority works, The Joy Luck Club has been praised in both the popular and critical milieux for its ability to foster a “sister-centered” (Welsch 29) sense of community both within and beyond the text itself. Yet it is this very same talent that has earned both Tan and Winfrey the derision of numerous literary critics; Scott Stossel, the editor of The Atlantic, remarked that “[t]here is something so relentlessly therapeutic, so consciously self-improving about [Winfrey’s] book club that it seems antithetical to discussions of serious literature. Literature should disturb the mind and derange the senses; it can be palliative, but it is not meant to be the easy, soothing one that Oprah would make it” (qtd. in Minzesheimer). In similar fashion, Asian American literary critics have, on the whole, taken umbrage at Tan’s penchant for constructing a bridge to and among her “predominantly white and female” readership (Wong 180), resulting in a loyal following that Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has derisively dubbed a “sugar sisterhood” (181). Like Stossel, Wong and many like-minded Asian American critics have argued that Tan’s novels are far too “soothing” to be “serious”: their “exoticizing” (191) depictions of China and traditional Chinese culture, in particular, “enable Orientalism to emerge in a form palatable to middle-class American readers” (181). The aim of this essay is neither to endorse nor refute such perspectives. What strikes me as especially interesting about the extremely polarized response to The Joy Luck Club is rather its persistent preoccupation with the serious and the playful—whether defined as the popular, the “easy,” the “palatable,” or the ......

Slanted Allusions: Transnational Poetics and Politics of Marilyn Chin and Russell Leong

This essay takes issue both with scholars who consider Chinese allusions in Asian American literature as Orientalist and with critics who advocate wholesale reclamation of an Asian (heroic) tradition. It shows through a detailed analysis of two poems how Chinese American writers could resort to bicultural interplay to convey transnational critique, and it contends that such deliberate filtering and revisioning of cultural legacies is in fact one of the hallmarks of Chinese American writing.

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...

Inhuman Citizenship: Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature. Juliana Chang.

Inhuman Citizenship: Traumatic Enjoyment and Asian American Literature. Juliana Chang.

Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms by Wen Jin (review)

Reviewed by: Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms by Wen Jin Belinda Kong Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms. By Wen Jin. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. 2012. The impulse to transnationalize the study of Asian American literature has grown apace in the past two decades, at the same time that a similar pattern evolved in China studies, under such rubrics as diasporic, Sinophone, and global Chinese literature and culture. Few, however, have brought to this project the comparative systematicness, dual geographical depth, and sustained thematic focus that characterizes Wen Jin’s Pluralist Universalism. Well researched and richly contextualized, Jin’s book examines the ethno-racial policies of the United States and the People’s Republic of China through the lens of their respective fictions on multiculturalism. Reading English alongside Chinese literary texts while working with cultural and scholarly sources across both languages, Jin adroitly mines for parallels between the two nations’ seemingly oppositional multicultural visions—American liberal multiculturalism on the one hand, China’s policy of ethnic autonomy on the other. In the process, Jin brings into rare critical dialogue the U.S.’s and the PRC’s divergent treatments of minority groups, persuasively arguing that their two multiculturalisms be understood as part of a “global movement,” “two different but not entirely incongruous forms of pluralism that have increasingly come to bear on each other” (1). As Jin observes, comparisons of the two countries’ ethno-racial policies often descend into a “solipsistic, accusatory mode” (xii), so that targeting the other regime’s minority governance has become constitutive to nationalistic rhetoric on both sides, giving rise to a recurrent and ever more prominent geopolitical discourse in our time. Given this polarized situation, Jin sees contemporary fiction as a fertile site for drawing out connections between the two official multiculturalisms and hence opening up a framework for “double critique.” Chapter 1 provides an informative survey of the historical origins and political underpinnings of American versus Chinese multiculturalism, one developing in the wake of racial desegregation and the other from socialist revolution. Yet both states, Jin asserts, “practice a conciliatory form of multiculturalism” that has at its core the “imperative of national unity” (43). Chapter 2 then identifies two popular novels, Clive Cussler’s Treasure of Khan (2006) and Jiang Rong’s Lang Tuteng/Wolf Totem (2004), that symptomize their countries’ conciliatory multiculturalism, each “projecting an image of ethno-racial harmony” while failing to tackle structural inequalities (73). From there, Jin turns to works by minority authors—with particular emphasis on Chinese American fiction—that explicitly challenge conciliatory multiculturalism and that propose more inclusive models of pluralism. Chapter 3 focuses on Alex Kuo’s Panda Diaries (2006) as exemplifying a double critique of the U.S.’s and the PRC’s internal colonization of indigenous groups. Chapter 4 further probes the failures of both states’ multicultural policies toward their Muslim communities from the perspectives of two Muslim writers, Zhang Chengzhi and Rabih Alameddine. Finally, Chapter 5 mediates between the Chinese original and English translation of Yan Geling’s Fusang/Lost Daughter of Happiness (2001) as well as its critical reception in both languages, rereading the novel as not just a narrative of historical [End Page 222] racial and gendered oppression but an utopian “queer” text that “helps imagine and broker a radical kind of pluralist universalism” (200). Compelling in its claims for the need to think between national discourses, to read minority writings comparatively and thereby transform our existing frameworks, Pluralist Universalism charts a valuable course for future transnational studies of both Asian American and Chinese literature. Belinda Kong Bowdoin College Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association

The Ethics of Race, Failure, and Asian American (Ethno)Futures

This essay explores the ethics of the unexpected by examining three examples of contemporary Asian American science fiction: Ted Chiang's Division by Zero and Story of Your Life, and Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. With each focusing on a form of negative critique, new theorizations of possible futures are developed, routed through representations both analogous and common to Asian American literature: affect, relations with the dead/past, and the immigrant family. The authors bring strategies for envisioning the future to crisis to engage an ethnofuturist project decoupled from traditional notions of historical meaning and sociological certitude.

The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature by Christopher Lee (review)

The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature by Christopher Lee (review)

Modern minority: Asian American literature and everyday life

Table of Contents Introduction Asian American Realism and the Forms of Everyday Minorness Part I: Discovering the Modern Everyday Chapter One The Outward Spiral: Kang and Bulosan Ignore the Everyday Chapter Two Little Things: The Uncanny Everyday of Internment Literature Part II: The Problem of Identity Chapter Three Unlikely Daughters, Exemplary Mothers, and Disembedded Chinamen: Jade Snow Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston Chapter Four The Changing Story of Thingness: From Kogawa and Keller to Ha Jin and Lan Samantha Chang Part III: Everyday Immanence Chapter Five Lists, Native Speaker, and the Politics of Emergence Chapter Six Extensive Time and Crumpled Surfaces: Projects of Identity in Frank Chin and Lois-Ann Yamanaka Conclusion Encountering Modernity Every Day

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 by Julia H. Lee (review)

Reviewed by: Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 by Julia H. Lee Caroline H. Yang (bio) Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937, by Julia H. Lee. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 228 pp. $23.00 paper. ISBN: 9780814752562. That 1896 is a defining year in the history of segregation and unequal citizenship in the United States is obviously common knowledge in critical race studies. What Julia Lee teaches us about the moment in Interracial Encounters is probably not: that the Chinese figured significantly in Plessy v. Ferguson as a crucial component in both the majority and dissenting opinions on whether or not segregation based on race—specifically, blackness—was constitutional. According to Lee, the discourse of what it meant to be Chinese was influential to the definition of what it [End Page 340] meant to be black, as both opinions adjudicated the placement of black bodies on a black–white racial binary through the figure of the Chinese. Naming the Plessy case as “the document that most dramatically reveals the ways that the figure of the Negro and the Asiatic were intertwined in this period” (42), Lee suggests in the rest of her book that 1896 was significant in not only instituting segregation but also inaugurating a particular brand of misreading. And this common misreading about the Plessy case has glossed over and continues to make invisible what she calls “encounters” between African Americans and Asians during this time, encounters wrought by the complexities of the historical moment following black emancipation and enfranchisement, as well as labor migrations from Asia. Interracial Encounters demonstrates that not accounting for the significance of Chineseness in how blackness was defined in the Plessy case had a critical role in how race was understood in the United States for much of the twentieth century. In this way, Lee’s close reading of the Plessy case speaks to her book’s methodological interventions. It shows the importance of literary studies in not just historical analyses of texts that have been read heretofore as concerning only blacks and whites but also Afro-Asian critique. As part of a vibrant and rising field of study that teases out Afro-Asian connections and disconnections, Lee’s book makes clear why many of its proponents are Asian Americanists whose approach to critical race studies is shaped by their understanding of the vicissitudes and contradictions of the Asian racial form in the United States. Quite simply, the reading practice developed in Lee’s book is original and insightful, and it brings to light figures and forms in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literatures that have often been rendered as insignificant nonpresence unrelated to other racialized figures. With a deep interest in writing a “historicizing project” (9), Lee points to a wide-ranging archive of minstrel show sheet music, political cartoons, and films, as well as literature, to explain that African Americans and Asians were the most rampantly compared minority groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also writes that the process of racializing the two groups was mutually constitutive and essential in the creation of the “fantasy of modern American identity” (21). Despite this, Lee argues that if and when they are remembered together in this period, they are seen as either antagonistic opposites or natural allies bonded together in solidarity based on shared experience of discrimination, violence, and exclusion. Against this way of thinking, Lee argues that we need to study not just the hegemonic ways in which blackness and Asianness became meaningful but also the ways in which African American and Asian American literatures contributed to and challenged the process of racial meaning making. [End Page 341] As such, save for one substantive chapter that explores the representations of African Americans and Asians in dominant popular culture from the Reconstruction period to the early twentieth century, all of the book’s chapters call attention to the formal strategies of literary texts by wide-ranging authors of color such as Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Nella Larsen, Edith Eaton, Winnifred Eaton, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang. Lee’s focus on...

War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (review)

Reviewed by: War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials Isabelle Thuy Pelaud (bio) War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work, by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 244 pp. $22.50 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8166-7096-3. War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work advances a strong theoretical framework informed by the literature of trauma and memory, Asian American literary criticism, and cultural studies to interpret the cultural production of Cambodian Americans. This book argues that because of the enormity of the scope of the “killing fields,” Khmer Americans’ cultural production cannot be [End Page 345] read and interpreted solely from a domestic lens. Rather, it necessitates a transnational perspective. The fight against racism on U.S. soil comes simultaneously with how Cambodian history is presented in the United States. The book examines a period of time when artists and intellectuals were brutally targeted for assassination, resulting in the death of 1.7 million Cambodians. It is no coincidence, Cathy Schlund-Vials argues, that Cambodian American artists engage tirelessly with genocide, human rights, and civil rights and the cultural aphasia produced by this period. She urges readers to see, hear, and validate what is being expressed and to take action. Schlund-Vials’s introduction, theoretical framework, and close reading of Khmer American film, literature, hip-hop, and art is an ambitious project. Contrary to how this event is represented in the United States, the author insists that the U.S. role in the genocide in Cambodia be remembered. Schlund-Vials challenges the claim of U.S. exceptionalism and the rhetoric depicting itself a fighter of the free world. The author reminds the reader that these atrocities, where near 25 percent of an entire population died, were a direct consequence of American military and financial involvement in the region. Through a diverse means of national amnesia and selective representation, what Schlund-Vials calls “schemes of strategic remembering,” the United States effectively evaded both “culpability and accountability” at the expense of those who were victims of the atrocities in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. In order to restore these memories, Schlund-Vials introduces the historical context from which these pieces emerge. Her close reading of Cambodian American cultural production shows how Cambodian American experiences and the identities they produce have been and continue to be heavily impacted by Cold War politics. In order to understand Cambodian American art and literature, the author argues that one must consider the recent history of Cambodia in relation to geopolitics and racial dynamics in the United States. For instance, unlike how the movie The Killing Fields is often regarded as an authoritative account of what took place in Cambodia after the end of the Vietnam War, the author shows that it is actually filled with inaccuracies, gaps, and biases. The ahistorical representation of the genocide leads to a pathologizing interpretation of the Khmer Rouge. This movie elides the role played by the United States in helping the Khmer Rouge come into power in the first place, something she insists is absolutely necessary to understand Cambodian American identities articulated in literature, art, and film. In another example, Schlund-Vials examines how discourses about the genocide continue to focus on the perpetuators of violence. Through dark tourism, the author argues that the genocide has been commodified at the expense [End Page 346] of legal justice and collective healing. Her discussion of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where three hundred detainees were executed daily between 1977 and 1978, specifically serves foreigners’ incredulous and nonreflexive gaze. In contrast, Schlund-Vials examines Cambodian American cultural production as a site of resistance and an alternative to these dominant narratives by framing them from the survivors’ perspective. By focusing on survivor memory, her work engages in a renegotiation of history. According to the author, memory plays a central role in resisting national investments in forgetting, erasing, or truncating the past. Khmer American cultural production embodies what Schlund-Vials calls a “tripartite identity formed by way of catastrophic collisions with U.S. cold war foreign policy, traumatically shaped by Khmer Rouge totalitarianism, and problematically fixed to post-Vietnam humanitarianism” (25). These...

Excerpt from <i>Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life</i>

Author(s): Lee, Yoon Sun | Abstract: Reprinted from Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life by Yoon Sun Lee, with permission from Oxford University Press USA. © 2013 Oxford University Press

The Form of Identity

Book Review| November 01 2013 The Form of Identity Lee, Christopher, The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012), pp. 208, cloth, $50.00. Cynthia Tolentino Cynthia Tolentino Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Novel (2013) 46 (3): 487–490. https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-2345840 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Cynthia Tolentino; The Form of Identity. Novel 1 November 2013; 46 (3): 487–490. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-2345840 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsNovel Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 by Novel, Inc.2013Duke University Press Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Therapeutic Intervention of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder by Chinese Medicine: Perspectives for Transdisciplinary Cooperation Between Life Sciences and Humanities

Taking post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as an example, we present a concept for transdisciplinary cooperation between life sciences and humanities. PTSD is defined as a long-term persisting anxiety disorder after severe psychological traumata. Initially recognized in war veterans, PTSD also appears in victims of crime and violence or survivors of natural catastrophes, e.g., earthquakes. We consider PTSD as a prototype topic to realize transdisciplinary projects, because this disease is multifacetted from different points of view. Based on physiological and molecular biological research to understand the causes of this disease, conventional academic medicine (to Western medicine) and pharmacology can offer a panel of drugs for treatment, albeit only with limited success. Hence, other treatment options are indispensable. Chinese medicine is frequently regarded as alternative to complement Western medicine. In fact, Chinese medicine offers a large array of both pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatments for PTSD patients. Narrative therapy represents a non-pharmacological approach combating PTSD both in Western medicine as well as in Chinese medicine to improve quality of life of affected patients. Narratives on traumatic experiences form a new genre of life writing in Asian American literature, whose excitement is considerably fueled by the tension between fictitious and very personal narratives taken from reality. Systematic academic reflections on narratives from PTSD patients in the field of Asian American studies may support the improvement of narrative therapy in medical practice. Chinese medicine has a strong philosophical background and may, therefore, serve as junction between life sciences with their strong rational and reductionistic way to generate new knowledge and more holistic approaches in traditional medicines and humanities. In this regard, Chinese medicine may represent a missing link between life science and life writing.