Growing Resources in Asian American Literary Studies

Asian Canadian Literary Studies is a relatively new field of study which began in the mid to late 1990s. Even though literature written by Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian Canadians had been published in literary magazines and anthologies since the 1970s, the identification of a distinct body of works called “Asian Canadian literature,” as Donald Goellnicht has noted (in “A Long Labour”), began only when there was a sociopolitical movement focused on identity politics. The literature includes early experiences of Chinese in Gum San or “gold mountain”; Japanese Canadian internment during the Second World War; South Asian Canadians diasporic writing from former British colonies like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Trinidad, Guyana, Tanzania, and Kenya; feminist experimental and genre writing; and writing from the post-1975 wave of first- and 1.5-generation immigrants and refugees. Early 21st-century works have moved from mainly autoethnographic stories to those that include larger sociocultural concerns, such as poverty, domestic violence, the environment, lesbian, queer, and transgender issues, and other intersectional systems of oppression that face Asian Canadians and other marginalized groups. Genres include memoirs, films, short stories, autobiographies, realist novels, science fiction, graphic novels, poetry, plays, and historical novels. In the past, without naming the field “Asian Canadians,” many critics have engaged with Asian Canadian literary texts. For example, articles and chapters about Joy Kogawa’s Obasan can be found in journals and books on Canadian, postcolonial, ethnic, and Asian American literature. South Asian Canadian literature also has strong links with postcolonial studies and institutions, such as the book publisher TSAR Publications, which began as the literary journal, The Toronto South Asian Review. In Canadian English usage, Asian usually refers to people from East and Southeast Asian while the term South Asian Canadian is a subgroup of Asian Canadian, according to Statistics Canada. In literary studies, it has only been in the past ten or fifteen years that the term “Asian Canadian” is used as a pan-ethnic term for all peoples who are originally from or have roots in Asia.

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The Posthuman Subject in/of Asian American Literature

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.921 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Michelle N. Huang

Keyword(s):

Critical Race Theory ◽

American Literature ◽

Asian Americans ◽

21St Century ◽

Asian American ◽

The United States ◽

Literary Analysis ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Asian American Literature ◽

Early 21St Century

Is the posthuman postracial? Posthumanism, an interpretive paradigm that unseats the human individual as the de facto unit of literary analysis, can be a powerful tool for Asian American literary studies when deployed with attention to critical race theory and literary form. Throughout American literature, Asian Americans have frequently been figured as inhuman—alien, inscrutable, and inassimilable. Representations of Asian Americans as either sub- or superhuman populate many genres, including adventure literature, domestic realism, comics, and science fiction. This trope, which combines yellow peril and model minority stereotypes, forms a through line that runs from depictions of Asian Americans as nerveless 19th-century coolies to 21st-century robotic office workers. Manifesting both threat and promise for America, posthuman representations of Asian Americans refract national and racial anxieties about the fading of the United States’ global influence as Asian nations, especially China, become political and economic superpowers. Rather than directly refuting these characterizations, Asian American writers have creatively engaged these same thematics to contemplate how developments in science and technology produce different ways of understanding the human and, concomitantly, engender changes in racial formation. Novelists, dramatists, poets, and artists have all deployed posthumanism in order to conduct imaginative experiments that challenge expectations regarding the typical purview of Asian American literature. Several nodes of inquiry that demonstrate the importance of posthumanist critique for Asian American literary studies include race as an index of humanity, the mutability of race through biotechnology, the amplification of racial inequality through infrastructure, and the reproduction of race through algorithmic culture. In the wake of early 21st-century ecological disaster and biotechnological fragmentation, examining the evolving relationship between Asian American racialization and posthumanism continues to provide important insights into how race is structured by the changing boundaries of the human and, in turn, demonstrates that the posthuman subject is never “beyond” race. In addition to offering an overview, this article provides a case study regarding the stereotyping of Asian Americans as robotic.

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Theresa, I Miss You (Arsenale Veneto)

October ◽

10.1162/octo_a_00374 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 170 ◽

pp. 146-147

Author(s):

Mia Kang

Keyword(s):

Asian American ◽

Korean American ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha ◽

Research Writing ◽

Long Day ◽

American Artist ◽

And Performance ◽

Venice Biennale

This poem was written after a long day at the 2019 Venice Biennale. It is from a body of work—spanning research, writing, and performance—dedicated to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Cha's seminal autoethnography Dictée has been readily mobilized by the disciplinary demands of both Asian American and literary studies, becoming the beloved exception reifying the rule of the false (and racialized, and gendered) binary between expressivity and innovation. Meanwhile, Cha's visual, video, and performance work has remained relatively obscure. My project for Theresa wants to un-discipline her archive while interrogating my own marking as a “Korean” “American” artist. In order to write this introduction, I had to go into the rain in all white, to move through silence with a hand to my mouth. In addressing these texts and rituals to Theresa, I seek to acknowledge the exchange we make in communing with the lost.

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Asian American Literary Studies, and: Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, and: Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits (review)

Journal of Asian American Studies ◽

10.1353/jaas.2007.0008 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 85-93

Author(s):

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Asian American ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Asian American Literature ◽

The Aesthetic

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Object Theory and Asian American Literature

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.865 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Chad Shomura

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Asian Americans ◽

Asian American ◽

Political Representation ◽

New Materialism ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Legal Rights ◽

Asian American Literature ◽

Asian America ◽

Object Theory

Do considerations of Asian America as, to use Kandice Chuh’s words, a “subjectless discourse” entail a turn toward objects? “Object theory” refers to a broad range of intellectual currents that take up objecthood, things, and matter as starting points for reconceptualizing identity, experience, politics, and critique. A few prominent threads of object theory include new materialism, thing theory, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology. Versions of object theory have also been developed in disability studies, critical ethnic studies, posthumanism, and multispecies studies. What spans these varied, sometimes contentious fields is an effort to displace anthropocentrism as the measure of being and knowledge. By troubling the (human) subject, the poststructural and deconstructive turns in Asian American studies have especially primed the field to more closely engage the place of objects in Asian America. While Asian American writers and critics have tirelessly explored subjectivity and its mixed fortunes—from providing access to legal rights, political representation, and social resources to facilitating the reinforcement of racial and ethnic hierarchies—they have also sought to tweak the historical relationship of Asian Americans to objects. Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects. Asian American literary studies develops object theories to grasp these dynamics through investigations of racial form, modes of objecthood, material things, ecology, and speculative fiction. Ultimately, object theory leads Asian American literary studies to reconsider the place of human subjectivity in politics, attend to the formation of Asian America through nonhuman matter, and develop positive visions for Asian American futures from speculative imaginations of being and reality. This article discusses the place of object theory in Asian American literature and surveys key topics, including phenomenologies of race, transvaluations of objecthood, speculative realisms, and ontologies of Asian America.

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The Asian American Movement and Critical Practice

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.844 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Douglas S. Ishii

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Literary Criticism ◽

Asian American ◽

Social Life ◽

Literary Studies ◽

Literary Scholarship ◽

Asian American Movement ◽

Asian American Student ◽

Movement Organizations ◽

The University

Though Asian American literary studies bears its critical legacy, the Asian American Movement (1968–1977) is largely invisible within Asian American literary studies. This has led to a critical murkiness when it comes to discerning the extent of the Movement’s influence on Asian American literary criticism. The Movement is often remembered in literary scholarship as the activities of the Combined Asian Resources Project (CARP)—a collective of four writers who were only loosely associated with Asian American Movement organizations. As metacritical scholarship on “Asian American” as a literary category has suggested, CARP’s introductory essay to Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974) is simultaneously held as the epitome of cultural nationalism’s misogynist tendencies and as the prototypical theorization of Asian American literature. However, this essentializing of CARP as the Movement ignores how the collected writings of the Asian American Movement, Roots (1970) and Counterpoint (1976), identify literary production and criticism as sites of racial critique in distinction from CARP’s viewpoints. Literary and cultural scholarship’s deconstruction of “Asian American” as a stable term has provided the tools to expand what constitutes the literature of the Movement. As Colleen Lye notes, the Asian American 1960s novel has emerged as a form that challenges the direct association of the era with the Movement. The historical arc of the Movement as centered on campuses highlights the university as an institution that enables Asian American student organizing, from the 1968 student strikes to contemporary interracial solidarity actions, as well as their narrativization into literary forms. Expanding what counts as literature, the decades of Asian American activism after the Movement proper have been documented in the autobiographies of organizers. In this way, the Asian American Movement is not a past-tense influence, but a continuing dialectic between narration and organizing, and literature and social life.

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