Cultural Brokers in Interwar Orientalism

Chapter one examines the formation of Asian American writers in the era of Asian exclusion through a comparative analysis of Younghill Kang’s and Carlos Bulosan’s responses to Orientalism in their works. As legal exclusion created the racial category of Asian in the United States, migrant Asian writers faced the challenge of creating modern Asian subjects in literary English. Cultural brokers between Orientalist images of their countries of origin and the modern experiences of Asian migrants in the United States, Kang and Bulosan tested the boundaries of English to represent migrant experiences lived in languages other than English. As a heterogeneous cultural epistemology, Orientalism placed different constraints on Kang, who contended with the Orientalist valorization of the Far East, and Bulosan, who resorted to the Filipino intellectual tradition of the ilustrado in the face of Orientalist primitivism.

Epilogue

The epilogue reflects on the future of bilingual brokering in the twenty-first century through David Henry Hwang’s bilingual play, Chinglish. While Chinglish seemingly overturns the social construction of bilingual personhood along the terms of possessive individualism by championing interlingual lapses, irregularities, and mistakes, this attempt to free the linguistic subject from the constraints of language as capital is delivered through a careful rendition of English-Mandarin bilingualism, enabled through such institutional actors’ interest in the play as the Chinese state. These conditions of possibility for Hwang’s bilingual play serve as a reminder that while bilingual personhood may recede from cultural significance as a site of examining the relationship between racial subjectivity and capital, bilingualism in cultural politics is still enmeshed in the flows of capital.

Global English and the Predicament of Monolingual Multiculturalism

Chapter five examines the writings of Julia Alvarez and Ha Jin as examples of literary bilingual brokering in the age of global English. As writers of bi-national scope in their writings, Alvarez and Ha Jin explore a cultural politics of circulation to dislodge the assumption of an organic relationship between national language and literature. However, the coexistence of World Literature in English and US multicultural literature in these writers’ works places their representations of political oppression and human rights abuse abroad within the pedagogy of neoliberal multiculturalism at home that is geared toward an individualistic understanding of freedom and rights. Even as Alvarez and Ha Jin seek to claim belonging in the homeland of language outside the narrow confines of national literature, that choice itself is circumscribed by the cultural politics of writing in English at a time of global English hegemony.

Bilingual Personhood and the American Dream

Chapter two examines the rhetorical and social construction of bilingual personhood as part of the American Dream through the debates on public bilingualism. The debates on bilingual education and bilingualism as civil right in the 1960s and 1970s centered on what language befitted an American citizen concordant with the vision of the American Dream. The argument against public bilingualism viewed English as the colorblind language of the American Dream whereas the argument for public bilingualism presented the idea that the American Dream can be in many languages. While these two poles of opposition and advocacy are well-rehearsed positions in the social debates on bilingualism, both positions presuppose possessive individualism in the construction of bilingual personhood, which limits the parameters of public bilingualism.

Dormant Bilingualism in Neoliberal America

Chapter four examines the relationship between language and race in neoliberal America through the writings of Richard Rodriguez and Chang-rae Lee and the legal briefs contesting English-only policies. As literary accounts of post-civil rights assimilation, Richard Rodriguez’s memoirs and Chang-rae Lee’s novel, Native Speaker, reflect the social concerns on civic disunity that provoked English-only policies and induced a social climate of language covering. This chapter shows the rhetorical figure of analogy in both the legal briefs contesting English-only rules, where bilingual plaintiffs claim an analogy between language and race to seek legal protection, and in Rodriguez’s and Lee’s representations of dormant bilingualism. While the analogy between language and race mostly fails in the courtrooms, it is a productive rhetorical move for Rodriguez and Lee as they show that language is prone to be influenced by the same capitalist logic that commodifies race.

Schooling Bilinguals In and Against Multiculturalism

Chapter three examines multicultural literary models of growing up in two languages through Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. By reading Paredes’s novel side-by-side Kingston’s widely discussed text, the chapter suggests that a syncretic bilingual personhood in which various anxieties of language’s value as property are worked out in relation to an ethnic subject’s formation is a key element of literary multiculturalism. The much-discussed controversy around The Woman Warrior recapitulates in the real world the fictional controversy over Guálinto’s betrayal of his Mexican heritage in George Washington Gómez as Asian American cultural nationalists accused Kingston of misrepresenting Chinese American experiences. In light of the conditions of bilingualism’s valorization and stigmatization in Paredes’s novel, the chapter revisits this controversy as ultimately symptomatic of the competing visions of bilingualism as cultural and human capital in multiculturalism.

Introduction

Based on the premise that the growth of bilingualism in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century is a consequence of post-1965 immigration, the chapter presents the book’s dual objective of tracing the effects of the social changes to bilingualism in cultural representations of bilingual personhood and of querying how these representations illuminate the social lives of bilingual persons. Crucial to the book’s discussion of bilingual personhood is the two poles of good and bad bilingualism, of bilingualism as asset and liability, which emerges in the social perception of language difference as it intersects with racial difference. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, but also supplementing it with ideas of symbolic capital that emerge in the debates on bilingualism, the introduction makes a case for how the idea of bilingualism as human capital shows the assimilation of Asian Americans and Latinos into racial capitalism. The story of bilingual personhood shows that the economy of liberal personhood allows for a split between desirable and undesirable bilinguals. The introduction suggests a structure of feeling in Asian American and Latino literature around this polarizing economy of language difference through which dimensions of a liberal subject’s life, such as inclusion, belonging, rights and entitlement, are contemplated and questioned.