At its annual convention in 1998, held in Honolulu, Hawai’i, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) presented a Fiction Award to Lois-Ann Yamanaka for her novel,Blu’s Hanging. Immediately following the presentation, though, a resolution was introduced to rescind the award, based on the charge that Yamanaka’s work contains stereotypical or racist depictions of Filipinos. The Honolulu convention was perhaps the most tumultuous in the short history of the AAAS (which was founded in 1979). The atmosphere was highly charged and many had a sense that the events taking place could mean the end of the Association. During a...

For some time it has been a critical commonplace to appeal to the various tropes of resistance in cultural texts. In a 1988 essay Meaghan Morris characterizes the discourse of resistance as the “banality” of cultural studies, calling into question the disarticulation of consumption from relations of production through the idealization of an all-knowing but nevertheless consuming subject of abjection.² John Guillory refers to this discourse as a form of “voluntarism” that encourages “a descent from the rigor of analysis to the rhetoric of praise or blame and thus links voluntaristic discourse to an even less credible moralism.”³ Not only...

I propose to read the development of the field of Asian American Studies from its beginnings to its present articulation through the tension between the aesthetic and the didactic. This tension, I suggest, can be mapped onto the fictional difference between Maxine Hong Kingston’s earlier novelThe Woman Warriorand her subsequent narrativeTripmaster Monkey, which appeared almost ten years later. I will argue thatTripmaster Monkeyemploys a form hitherto absent from Asian American literature as well as the theoretical discussion surrounding this literature.Tripmaster Monkeycan be read as an instance of what I would call “openended didacticism.”...

“There was no indication,” writes Marjorie Perloff of John Yau’s early career, “that the poet is in fact Chinese-American.”¹ In its earlier stages, Yau’s poetry, Perloff’s statement suggests, doesn’t readily fit into any simplified conceptualization of ethnic poetry. Yet Timothy Yu has argued that “Perloff’s doubt about Yau’s Chinese Americanness can thus be seen as a crucial effect of Yau’s work: the nagging sense that we do not know what it means to be ‘Chinese’ anymore, even as we are constantly reminded of it’s centrality.”² Indeed, Yau’s work causes traditional assumptions of what ethnic poetry is to fray at their...

This eassy asks how the formal conventions of the classic realist novel relate to its thematic and ideological concerns in Shyam Selvadurai’sFunny Boyand Michael Ondaatje’sAnil’s Ghost, two novels written by Sri Lankan-Canadians, set in Sri Lanka in 1977–83 and 1992, respectively, and explicitly concerned with portraying violent political turmoil and its effects on ordinary people.¹ Though set outside North America and unconcerned with U.S. or Canadian relations with Asian countries or people, these texts share with Asian North American texts the drive to interpellate the reader as a sympathetic observer of social injustices.

Shyam Selvadurai’sFunny...

In the last few years, some South Asians writers in the United States have moved away from recounting thinly veiled, sociopolitical accounts of immigrant experiences to fashion aesthetically rich narratives that create a different kind frisson and reading pleasure. This difference, evident in select contemporary South Asian fiction in North America, is based upon an aesthetic of affect, i.e., evoking levels of poignant pleasure through conventional literary tropes and formal devices, as for example, through a child’s narrative perspective, which blends together innocence with a sense of helplessness in order to generate pathos. In contrast, the narrative fulcrum in the...

Asian american poets have a singular plight: they write within the constraints of an American poetry indelibly marked by Orientalism. American poetry was reborn in a modernist revolution spearheaded by Ezra Pound’s Imagist movement. Pound took seriously what had been a fad—adding an Oriental flourish to poetry in the early twentieth century—and made it a centerpiece of his argument for a new American poetry. In search of a remedy for what he considered the excesses of the recent past, Pound turned to the East in order to purify modern poetry. To insist on objective values is a hallmark...

Ever since my first reading of Fae Myenne Ng’sBonewhen it was published in 1993, I was struck by its stylistic and compositional subtlety. Despite the deceptive simplicity of its prose,Bone—written over a ten-year span—is very far from documentary realism or autobiographical straightforwardness. Quite the reverse, the peculiarity of this novel seems to meto lie in its full, deliberate, and even openly displayed engagement with the structural, stylistic, and thematic features typical of some of the more canonical novels of mainstream American modernism, such asThe Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury,orAbsalom, Absalom!:...

Subverting traditional autobiographical structure to deploy originative formal and aesthetic concerns—a correlate to revised perceptions on subjectivity, identity, and ethnicity—is a prevalent strategy in contemporary Asian American life writing. The increasingly dialogic nature of life writing reflects a multi-voiced cultural situation that allows the subject to control the tensions between personal and communal dialogues within texts that signify discursively. Issues of self-representation—with its attendant concerns with identity politics, the rewriting of history, and the attempt to validate personal and social experience—become central to the autobiographical strategies employed by many Asian American writers as they perform individual...

Fantasy is perhaps entering a golden age within our culture. Thanks to J. K. Rowling’sHarry Potterseries as well as the recent Tolkien films, fantasy books for both children and adults are proliferating at a seemingly magical rate. As society has grown more multicultural, fantasy as a genre has become increasingly pluralistic, and so the time is ripe for the delineation of Asian American fantasy. By writing within this nascent subgenre, Laurence Yep and Cynthia Kadohata begin to transform both fantasy and Asian American literature, appeal to a broader audience than each separate genre traditionally reaches, and model an...

Scholars interested in studying formal aesthetics in Asian American theater have been challenged by a canon dominated by realist dramaturgy. In fact as a representational model rooted in the close correspondence to observable, physical life, realism has become a signature feature of the past thirty years of Asian American playwriting. Audiences of Asian American dramas have therefore been witness to a life-like mise en scene, one filled with psychologically complex characters carefully drawn so as to embody not only specific social and environmental conditions, but the motions and gestures of everyday life as well. This embrace of realist aesthetics by...