Editor's Preface

Throughout the evolution of scholarship by and about Asian Americans, much of the work focusing on the people themselves—as opposed to institutions, laws, and government—has centered on the individual psyche. Whether discussing Robert Park's "marginal man," Maxine Hong Kingston's "girlhood among ghosts," Edna Bonacich's "middleman minority," or Judy Wu's application of "liminality," the key players in each story have engaged in essentially private struggles for identity and acceptance in relation to majority culture. Indeed, among the characters created by novelists like Kingston and Amy Tan, for example, such internalized anomie typically remains hidden from view until its revelation in some epiphanal, cathartic moment.

The articles offered in this issue of JAAS also explore personal and often suppressed angst but within a profoundly public context. In his analysis of Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker, Daniel Kim foregrounds the character, John Kwang, an imagined Asian American politician who transcends the realm of group-specific politics to champion the interests of a broader pan-ethnic constituency. Prema Kurien presents a socio-political study of Indian American activism and the competition between its leaders over whether "Indian" should be defined through religious, ethnic, or national measures. Finally, Esther Kim Lee merges the private and public by examining the displayed identity struggles reflected in the work of representative Asian American performers over the past three decades. By injecting such classic issues into the public sphere, Kim, Kurien, and Lee take old stories in new directions and, in so doing, further the development of a fresh and much-needed perspective in Asian American Studies.