Reviewed by: Bilingual Brokers: Race, Literature, and Language as Human Capital by Jeehyun Lim Kimberly McKee (bio) Bilingual Brokers: Race, Literature, and Language as Human Capital, by Jeehyun Lim. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. 270 pp. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 978–0–8232–7531–1. American anxieties concerning the English language and non-English-speaking individuals in the United States are central to how everyday Americans understand English as a marker of belonging to the nation. Jeehyun Lim critically engages questions of belonging, authenticity, and assimilation in her exploration of Asian American and Latino writings and mediation on language. Bilingual Brokers: Race, Literature, and Language as Human Capital presents a nuanced discussion of the shift from monolingualism to bilingualism in the United States, tracing the tensions produced by bilingual speakers as simultaneously possessing human and cultural capital as well as embodying the alien and foreign. Bilingual Brokers underscores bilingualism’s increased value as the stigma toward it waned in favor of locating its significance in a capitalist society. Lim demonstrates how the neoliberal nation-state incorporates bilingual speakers. As a broker, bilingual speakers serve as an interlocutor between multiple worlds and languages, interpreting and mediating the nuances in between. This brokering relies on the racialized capital related to what Lim terms possessive individualism. For Lim, possessive individualism demonstrates the limits and possibilities that exist for Asian Americans and Latinos in the liberal economy. This framework accounts for the racialization undergone by Asian Americans and Latinos whereby they are positioned as alien to the nation, and how this affects writers’ relationships to American literature. Centering Asian American and Latino writings as American, Bilingual Brokers elucidates the racialization authors undergo as national aliens and how they experience what Lim calls flexible incorporation. Beginning with an examination of Younghill Kang (The Grass Roof, 1931; East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee, 1937) and Carlos Buloson (America Is in the Heart, 1943) in chapter 1, Lim looks toward how Orientalism provides an avenue for these authors to enact “acceptable Asian identities at the time of Asian exclusion” (34). This is not to say the authors readily embrace Orientalism nor experience [End Page 486] it similarly; rather, they negotiate this positioning against what it means to be an Asian writer of American literature. Both Kang and Buloson serve as brokers translating their homelands and cultural traditions to readers in the West. They carefully negotiate their positions during a time of legal exclusion that have allowed for selective cultural inclusion. Chapters 2 and 3 raise questions concerning inclusivity and diversity in an exploration of public bilingualism in policy debates and the bicultural coming-of-age narratives of Américo Paredes (George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel, 1990) and Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior, 1976). Lim traces racial liberalism, cultural pluralism, and multiculturalism to better understand how they “inform the cultural views on public bilingualism” (64). Public bilingualism focused on the human capital of language and its intersections with cultural pluralism. Paying close attention to the intersections of language and education under racial liberalism, Bilingual Brokers exposes the limitations of assertions that English is a colorblind language in tracing the federal and state debates on bilingual education following the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. These debates were also impacted by Cold War nationalism’s entreaties for foreign language acquisition. Possessive individualism accounts for the inclusion of bilingual personhood in the American dream. In her last two chapters, Lim calls attention to the shift in bilingualism’s value from personal deficit to an object of desire in the neoliberal world, where global English is on the rise. This evolution in bilingualism’s acceptance coincides with the existence of dormant bilingualism, whereby bilingualism goes unacknowledged until it becomes an asset. Engaging jurisprudence to trace public bilingualism, Lim draws on the arguments of bilingual plaintiffs in her reading of Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1982). She examines how the intersections of the Spanish language and socioeconomic class result in different social capital and value being bestowed on Spanish speakers. This discussion of bilingualism shifts from considering a language’s worth to understanding its commodification as capital in her interrogation...
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Sep 30, 2019
Rosalie S Aldrich + 1
Open Access
