Paul Lai – Written and Oral Exams Reading List (Fall 2003)

Major: Critical Theory and Cultural Studies
    John McGowan (Director), Tyler Curtain, Rashmi Varma (Exams Chair)
Minor: Twentieth Century American Literature
    María DeGuzmán, Priscilla Wald

MAJOR LIST

What are the conceptual terrains of contemporary Asian American Studies?  What theoretical frameworks are most tractable for Asian Americanist critique?  For my major exams, I have chosen to read across the field of Asian American Studies to get a sense of what is at stake.  I am particularly interested in what genealogies of social and cultural theory Asian Americanists trace and engage.  My reading focus is on the work done in Asian American Studies based on various theoretical schools and disciplinary formations.

I. Cultural Studies/Cultural Materialist Critique

1. Gramsci, Antonio.  Prison Notebooks.  (selections)
2. Hall, Stuart.  Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies.
3. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics.
4. Lye, Colleen.  “Toward an Asian (American) Cultural Studies: Postmodernism and the ‘Peril of Yellow Capital and Labor.”
5. Maira, Sunaina.  “Henna and Hip Hop: The Politics of Cultural Production and the Work of Cultural Studies.”
6. ---.  Desis in the House.
7. Marx, Karl.  Capital.  (excerpts from Vol. I)
8. ---.  The German Ideology.
9. Williams, Raymond.  Marxism and Literature.  (“Culture,” “Language,” and “Ideology”)

II. Critical Race Theory/Legal Studies

1. Crenshaw, Kimberle, et al, eds. Critical Race Theory.
Introduction
Richard Delgado – “The Imperial Scholar”
Mari Matsuda – “Looking to the Bottom”
Gary Peller – “Race-Consciousness”
Neil Gotanda – “A Critique of ‘Our Constitution Is Color-Blind’”
Cheryl I. Harris – “Whiteness as Property”
2. Some Supreme Court cases: Ozawa v US, US v Thind, and Korematsu v US

III. Queer Theory/Sexuality Studies

1. Eng, David, and Alice Hom, eds. Q&A: Queer in Asian America. (selections)
2. Leong, Russell, ed. Asian American Sexualities. (selections)
3. Ting, Jennifer P. "The Power of Sexuality." Journal of Asian American Studies 1.1 (1998): 65-82.
4. Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter.  (Intro, “Bodies that Matter,” “Passing, Queering,” “Critically Queer”)
5. ---. Gender Trouble.
6. Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo, and Martin F. Manalansan IV, eds. Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism.
7. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. (Introduction)
8. Patton, Cindy, and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler, eds. Queer Diasporas. (selections)
9. Povinelli, Elizabeth A., and George Chauncey. "Thinking Sexuality Transnationally." (Special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies). GLQ 5.4 (1999): 439-49.
10. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet.  (Intro, Ch 1)
11. Somerville, Siobhan. Queering the Color Line. (selections)

IV. Psychoanalysis and Race

1. Boyarin, Daniel.  “Freud’s Baby, Fliess’s Maybe: Homophobia, Anti-Semitism, and the Invention of Oedipus.”  GLQ 2.1-2 (1995): 115-47.
2. ---.  “What Does a Jew Want? Or, the Political meaning of the Phallus.”
3. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief.
4. Eng, David. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America.
5. Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian, eds.  Loss: The Politics of Mourning. (selections)
6. Freud, Sigmund.  “Mourning and Melancholia.”
7. Spillers, Hortense.  “All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race.”
8. ---.  “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”

V. Third-World Feminism/Postcolonial Theory

1. Alexander, M. Jacqui, and Chandra Mohanty, eds. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. (selections)
2. Bhabha, Homi K.  “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.”
3. ---.  “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.”
4. Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies.
5. Cooppan, Vilashini.  “W(h)ither Post-colonial Studies? Towards the Transnational Study of Race and  Nation.”  Postcolonial Theory and Criticism.  Eds. Chrisman and Parry.
6. Fanon, Frantz.  The Wretched of the Earth.
7. Mohanty, Chandra T.  “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.”
8. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.
9. Retamar, Roberto Fernando.  Caliban and Other Essays.
10. San Juan, E., Jr. Beyond Postcolonial Theory.
11. Said, Edward.  Orientalism. (Introduction)
12. Spivak, Gayatri.  “Can the Subaltern Speak.”
13. ---.  “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism.”
14. Trinh T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism.

VI. Asian Studies/Diaspora Studies/Asia-Pacific Transnationalism

1. Anderson, Benedict.  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
2. Appadurai, Arjun.  “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.  1996.
3. Chuh, Kandice, and Karen Shimakawa, eds. Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora. (selections)
4. Chun, Allen.  “Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity.”  Boundary 2 23.2 (Summer 1996): 111-138.
5. Dirlik, Arif, ed.  What Is in a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea.  1998. (selections)
6. Miyoshi, Masao.  “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State.”  Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 726-751.
7. Prashad, Vijay. The Karma of Brown Folk.
8. Wilson, Rob.  “Imagining ‘Asia-Pacific’: Forgetting Politics and Colonialism in the Magical Waters of the Pacific.  An Americanist Critique.”  Cultural Studies 14.3/4 (2000): 562-592.
9. Wilson, Rob and Dirlik, Arif, eds.  Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. (selections)

VII. Race Theory/Ethnic Studies

1. Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. (Introduction)
2. Banton, Michael. Racial Theories.
3. Buell, Lawrence.  “Postcolonial Anxiety in Classic U.S. Literature.”
4. Cherniavsky, Eva.  “Subaltern Studies in a U.S. Frame.”
5. Christian, Barbara.  “The Race for Theory.”
6. Darder, Antonia, and Rodolfo D. Torres, eds. The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy and Society. (selections)
7. Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic, eds. Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror. (selections)
8. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack.
9. Goldberg, David Theo. The Racial State.
10. Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease, eds.  Cultures of United States Imperialism.  (Essays by Kaplan, Pease, Vicente L. Rafael, Jose David Saldivar, Walter Benn Michaels)
11. Koshy, Susan.  “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness.”
12. Kutzinski, Vera M.  “Commentary: American Literary History as Spatial Practice.”
13. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formations in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s.
14. Park, Edward J. W., and John S. W. Park.  “A New American Dilemma? Asian Americans and Latinos in Race Theorizing.”
15. Roediger, David.  “Whiteness and Ethnicity in the History of ‘White Ethnics’ in the United States.”
16. Singh, Amritjit, and Peter Schmidt, eds. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature. (selections)
17. Stoler, Ann Laura.  “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth.”
18. Wong, Sau-ling.  “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads.”

VIII. History

1. Chan, Sucheng. Asian Americans: An Interpretive History.
2. Okihiro, Gary. Common Ground: Reimagining American History. 2001.
3. Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics of Race in San Francisco's Chinatown.
4. Simpson, Caroline Chung. An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945-1960. 2001.
5. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore.
6. Yu, Henry. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern America. 2001.

IX. Media Studies

1. Feng, Peter. Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video. (Introduction)
2. Feng, Peter, ed. Screening Asian Americans. (selections)
3. Hamamoto, Darrell.  Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation.
4. Hamamoto, Darrell, and Sandra Liu.  Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism. (selections)
5. Lee, Rachel C., and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, eds.  AsianAmerica.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace. (selections)
6. Nakamura, Lisa.  “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet.”
7. Shimakawa, Karen. National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage. 2002.
8. Torres, Sasha.  Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights.
9. Trinh T. Minh-ha.  When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics.

X. Other Asian Americanist Work

1. Ancheta, Angelo N. Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience.
2. Espiritu, Yen Le. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities.
3. Hatamiya, Leslie T. Righting a Wrong: Japanese Americans and the Passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
4. Hing, Bill Ong. Making and Remaking Asian American Through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990.
5. Manalansan, Martin F., IV, ed. Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America. (selections)
6. Omi, Michael, and Dana Takagi, eds. Amerasia Journal 21.1-2 (1995). Special Issue, "Thinking Theory in Asian American Studies."
7. Shankar, Lavina Dhingra and Rajini Srikanth, eds.  A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America. 1998.
8. Takagi, Dana. The Retreat from Race.

MINOR LIST

As with the major field, the minor field in Twentieth Century Literature will take an Asian American focus. Section I below lists a few book-length studies of Asian American literatures. I rely on this work for a sense of the field of Asian American literary studies' central texts, questions, concerns, and approaches to the literature.   Section II is a reading list of some major texts in Asian/American literature. I begin with and focus on some important anthologies that have served, especially since the 1970s, to bring together a range of different writers under the project of “Asian American writing.” These anthologies will be crucial to exploring the political project of an Asian American pan-ethnic solidarity in the aesthetic realm of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction writing.  In Section III, I broaden my readings to a comparative ethnicities framework within contemporary American literatures. In particular, I read works that help to explore the connections between racial/ethnic identifications and cultural production.

I. Asian American Literary Criticism

1. Altieri, Charles.  “Images of Form vs. Images of Content in Contemporary Asian-American Poetry.”  Qui-Parle 9.1 (1995): 71-91.
2. Bow, Leslie. Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature. 2001.
3. Chang, Juliana. "Reviews: 'Forbidden Entries,' by John Yau." MELUS 23.3 (Fall 1998). 226-228.
4. ---. "Reading Asian-American Poetry." MELUS 21.1 (Spring 1996). 81-.
5. Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences. (Introduction)
6. Chu, Patricia. Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America.
7. Chuh, Kandice.  Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique.
8. Davis, Rocío G. and Sämi Ludwig, eds. Asian American Literature in the International Context: Readings on Fiction, Poetry and Performance. 2002.
9. De Jesus, Melinda.  “Rereading history, rewriting desire.”
10. Kang, Laura Hyun Yi. Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women.
11. Kim, Elaine. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context.
12. Kim, Elaine, and Norma Alarcón, eds. Writing Self / Writing Nation.
13. Koshy, Susan.  “The Fiction of Asian American Literature.”
14. Lee, Rachel C. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation.
15. Li, David Leiwei. Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent.
16. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier.
17. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America.

II. Asian American Literatures
 
Anthologies

1. Asian Women United. Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings by and About Asian American Women. 1989.
2. Chan, Jeffery Paul, ed. The Big Aiiieeeee. 1991.
3. Chin, Frank, et al, eds. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers.
4. Francia, Luis, ed. Flippin': Filipinos on America. 1996.
5. Hagedorn, Jessica, ed. Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction. 1993.
6. Lew, Walter, ed. Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry. 1995.
7. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, and Cheng Lok Chua, eds.  Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing.  2000.
8. Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin, Mayumi Tsutakawa, Margarita Donnelly, eds. The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology. 1989.
9. Maira, Sunaina and Rajini Srikanth, eds. Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America.
10. Mirikitani, Janice, ed. Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology. 1980.
11. Moua, Mai Neng, ed.  Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by Hmong Americans.  2002.
12. Ratti, Rakesh, ed. A Lotus of Another Color: An Unfolding of the South Asian Gay and Lesbian Experience. 1993.
13. Srikanth, Rajini, and Esther Y. Iwanaga.  Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing.  2001.
14. Tachiki, Amy, et al. Roots: An Asian American Reader. 1971.
15. Tran, Barbara, Monique T. D. Truong, and Luu Truong Khoi, eds. Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry & Prose.

Poetry

1. Ai.  (selections in Norton)
2. Berssenbrugge, Mei-Mei.  Four Year Old Girl.
3. Chang, Juliana, ed. Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, 1892-1970. New York: Asian American Writers Workshop, 1996.
4. Chung, Frances. Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple. (1960s and 1970s collections)
5. Hongo, Garrett, ed. The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America. 1993.
6. Inada, Lawson. Before the War: Poems as they happened. 1971.
7. Lai, H. Mark., Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, eds. Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. 1980.
8. Lee, Li-Young.
9. Lew, Walter. Treadwinds: Poems and Intermedia Texts. 2002.
10. Leong, Russell. The Country of Dreams and Dust. 1993.
11. Liu, Timothy. Burnt Offerings. 1995.
12. Mirikitani, Janice. Awake in the River. 1978.
13. Mootoo, Shani. The Predicament of Or. 2001.
14. Mura, David.  The Colors of Desire. 1995.
15. Song, Cathy. Picture Bride. 1982.
16. Tran, Barbara. In the Mynah Bird's Own Words.
17. Yamada, Mitsuye. Camp Notes and Other Poems. 1976. [1998].
18. Yau, John.  Radiant Silhouette: New & Selected Work, 1974-1988. 1989.

Prose

1880-1940
1. Long, John Luther. Madame Butterfly. 1906?. [2002]
2. Watanna, Onoto (Winnifred Eaton). 1879-1954.
3. Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton). Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. (1865-1914).
4. Kang, Younghill. East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee. 1937. [1997].
 
1941-1965
1. Bulosan, Carlos. America is in the Heart. 1946.
2. Mori, Toshio.  Yokohama, California. 1949.
3. Wong, Jade Snow. Fifth Chinese Daughter. 1950.
4. Lee, C. Y. The Flower Drum Song. 1957.
5. Yamamoto, Hisaye. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories. 1950s-1980s. [2001].
6. Okada, John. No No Boy. 1950s. [1976].
7. Chu, Louis. Eat a Bowl of Tea. 1961.
       
 1966-1989
1. Murayama, Milton. All I Asking For Is My Body. 1975.
2. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. 1976.
3. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. 1981.
4. Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. 1982.
5. Law-Yone, Wendy. The Coffin Tree. 1983.
6. Kim, Ronyoung. Clay Walls. 1986.
7. Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. 1988.
8. Hayslip, Le Ly. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. 1989.
9. Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. 1989.
10. Mukherjee, Bharati. Jasmine. 1989.
11. Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. 1989.

1990-2002
1. Alumit, Noel. Letters to Montgomery Clift. 2002.
2. Bacho, Peter. Cebu. 1991.
3. Chin, Frank. Bulletproof Buddhists and other essays. 1998.
4. ---. Donald Duk. 1991.
5. Choi, Susan. The Foreign Student. 1998.
6. Chua, Lawrence. Gold by the Inch. 1998.
7. Francia, Luis. Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago. 2001.
8. Hagedorn, Jessica. Dogeaters. 1990.
9. Kamani, Ginu. Junglee Girl. 1995.
10. Law-Yone, Wendy. Irrawaddy Tango. 1993.
11. Lee, Chang-rae. Native Speaker. 1995.
12. Linmark, R. Zamora. Rolling the R's. 1996.
13. Mistry, Rohinton. Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag. 1997.
14. Mootoo, Shani. Cereus Blooms at Night. 1996.
15. Mura, David. Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei. 1991.
16. Ng, Fae Myenne. Bone. 1993.
17. Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. 1997.
18. Wong, Norman. Cultural Revolution. 1994.
19. Yamanaka, Lois-Ann. Blu's Hanging. 1997.
20. Yamashita, Karen Tei. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. 1990.
21. ---. Circle K Cycles. 2001.

III. Contemporary Literature, Comparative Ethnicities

1. Algarin, Miguel.  Nuyorican poetry scene.
2. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. 1987. [1999].
3. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time.
4. Bulkin, Elly, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith. Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism. 1984.
5. Castillo, Ana.  Massacre of the Dreamed.
6. Diaz, Junot. Drown. 1996.
7. Gomez-Pena, Guillermo.  New World Border.
8. Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. 1982.
9. Mackey, Nathaniel. Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing.
10. ---.  Eroding Witness: Poems.  1985.
11. Marshall, Paule. Brown Girls, Brownstones. 1959.
12. Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 1981.
13. Moraga, Anzaldua, and Keating, eds.  This Bridge Called Home.
14. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970.
15. ---.  Playing in the Dark.
16. Obejas, Achy.  We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?  1994.
17. Paredes, Américo. George Washington Gómez. 1990.
18. Perez, Loida Maritza.  Geographies of Home.
19. Rechy, John. City of Night.
20. Reed, Ishmael. Flight to Canada.
21. Troyano, Alina.  I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures.
22. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens.

 
September 12, 2003

Questions and General Topics for Thought

One of the central issues in Asian American Studies today is how to renew paradigms for understanding “Asian American” as a political category, as a cultural identity, and as a historical entity.  The founding paradigms for AAS rest heavily on at least three principles: (1) to claim America as home for a largely American-born population of Asian Americans and to fight against the “perpetual foreigner” assumption, (2) to assert common political goals for all “Asian Americans” against a fairly static conception of an oppressive dominant culture, and (3) to recover the untold history of Asian Americans in the United States.  Demographic shifts and changes in immigration policies since the 1960s, however, have contributed to a marked change in the makeup of Asian American populations.  This change has forced AAS to reconsider the assumptions of a politics and discourse centered on American-born Asians, the uniformity of political goals for the constituent populations, and the varied histories of Asian American populations.  How have Asian Americanists employed alternative paradigms of political theory, cultural politics, and historiography to take into account changes in Asian American populations?  What are some of the issues that come up when engaging theories that have developed in different contexts?

Psychoanalysis is undergoing a renaissance in AAS and race theory.  In particular, theorists have taken up Freud’s discussion of melancholia as a model for understanding the psychic dimensions of assimilation and loss for raced (and white) people.  These theorists focus on Freud’s writings as narratives of socialization that are contingent upon the particular moment of early twentieth century European intellectual work.  How do they then account for an interest in thinking through these narratives to understand contemporary American racialist thought?  What does this new use of melancholia offer race theory that other engagements with psychoanalysis did not?

Thinking outside the frame of the United States is increasingly important for AAS, not just because the balance of American-born to foreign-born Asian Americans has shifted dramatically to the latter, but also because the last few decades (both in and out of the academy) have changed how people around the world relate to nation-states and “homes.”  How do the categories of race and ethnicity hold up for the study of Asian Americans, Asians in America, diasporic Asians, and Asia-US relations?  Is it still useful to employ “Asia” as a category when discussing the specific histories of ethnic groups in relation to the US or other parts of the world?  (For example, does the study of US-Phillipines involvement, neo-imperialism, and cultural hybridity gain anything from engaging with the category of Asian American when it is markedly different from US-Vietnam involvement or US-China relations?)

Exploring the relationship between cultural production and material realities is an important aspect of cultural studies’ work to understand hegemony.  How has AAS opened up questions of this relationship in regards to a dominant, national imaginary as well as to counter-imaginaries around Asian-identified peoples?  In particular, how has the work of poets and novelists influenced these discussions?

Both queer and postcolonial theories offer important denaturalizations of ideas such as sexuality, gender, nation, culture, and representation.  How do the insights of these theories help to reconceptualize the category of “Asian American”?  For example, how can queer theory unmoor narratives of Asian diasporas rooted in kinship and heteronormativity?  Or, how can postcolonial theory revise understandings of immigration?

Given the restrictions on language-knowledge and the general history of AAS, Asian American literature classes mostly focus on Anglophone writing.  However, these classes often include writers from Canada, Britain, and other English-speaking countries.  They seem quite willing to go outside national boundaries, yet unwilling or unable to consider writings in other languages by writers actively engaged with and living in US culture.  Some scholars have lamented this lack of scholarship done on literature written by Asian Americans in their “native” languages.  It seems that Latina/o literatures have a different relationship to Spanish language.  Discuss this question of language in the construction of literary communities.  Consider also the role of translation.

How do anthology editors and Asian American literary scholars construct “Asian American writing”?  What are their criteria for selecting writings for an anthology on Asian American writing?  How do these categorizations attempt to make sense of extra-textual realities?

While publishing successes like Amy Tan in the 1980s brought Asian American literature to national consciousness, many scholars would argue that her success is ambivalent at best as it serves to homogenize the concerns of Asian American literature and perhaps to essentialize them.  Aside from questions of assimilation and negotiating a subjectivity straddling a Western present and Eastern past, what are some important themes in other Asian American writers’ work?  How do particular writers write against easy assumptions of a direct connection between racial/ethnic identity and writing?

What does Asian American racial politics offer more general studies of race?  How have Asian Americanists attempted to flesh out racial theories focused on a black-white binary?  Based on a panethnic political category, does Asian American racial theory have more in common with Latina/o theorizing that must always point out the fallacy of a “latino race”?

Current Research Topics

I am including below some brief notes on research projects on my plate…

(1) Trauma, Injury, and Asian American Studies.

A recent conference focused on the topic of rethinking “injury” as the site of inquiry for AAS.  This question of the centrality of injury to a knowledge project is important for both supporters and critics of programs like AAS, African American Studies, Latina/o Studies, or Native American Studies.  Are these programs merely meant to address and provide redress for past wrongs perpetrated on various populations?  What are the implications for imagining the a priori “brokenness” of Asian American subjects?  I am particularly interested in considering some of these questions through a focus on trauma narratives and an attention to historiography.  How do novelists and poets narrate submerged histories?  What are they doing when they create (fictionalize) histories?  And what if they reach back into mythological pasts?  This semester, I will be working on a conference presentation on these questions, centered around Larissa Lai’s novels and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night.

(2) Asian Americans, Race, and the American South.

Especially given my location at UNC, questions of the study of Asian Americans (of AAS) in the South seem particularly relevant to AAS as a whole.  While some work has been done on Asian American communities such as the Chinese Mississipians who settled in the US in the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, more needs to be done to understand the racial dynamics of the antebellum years as well as during the Reconstruction period when questions of race arguably were central to national consciousness.   I would like to take up the special case of Chang and Eng Bunker, the Siamese twins (ethnically Chinese), who settled in North Carolina in the early 1800s after their worldwide travels as spectacles.  What drew me to these figures are some recent American novels and movies about conjoined twins.  I am interested in looking at how these twins and the community around them negotiated their differences, perhaps using their physical difference to balance their racial difference.

I also have in mind a project to consider Hmong refugee populations in the US, especially given the fact that North Carolina is home to one of the largest populations of Hmong refugees post-Vietnam War.  I would like to consider the literature coming out of these communities as well as the seeming wealth of anthropological/social-work type studies that have tried to understand cultural differences (most commonly in understandings of medical practices).

(3) Asian American Popular Culture.

The reception of Justin Lin’s film, Better Luck Tomorrow (2002), is just one recent example of how the visibility of Asian Americans in popular culture is still a novel thing and a contentious one when it comes to the politics of representation.  I think it would be interesting to consider the various subcultures of Asian American youth as they pick up, create, appropriate, circulate, and transform elements of popular culture from a variety of sources – kung fu movies, Hong Kong cinema, Japanese pop music, hip hop, and fashion.  It would be particularly interesting to consider, along the lines of Sunaina Maira’s work, how these communities understand their relationship to these cultural forms and how other groups view their engagements (both within Asian American communities and outside).


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