Beyond Literary Chinatown (review)

In Beyond Literary Chinatown, Jeffrey F. L. Partridge seeks to contribute to the ongoing reconsideration of form in ethnic literatures. Part of a larger trend in literary studies more generally, the return to form has manifested itself in Asian American literary criticism through the appearance of such groundbreaking studies as Josephine Nock-Hee Park’s Apparitions of Asia (2008), Timothy Yu’s Race and the Avant-Garde (2009), Xiaojing Zhou and Samina Najmi’s edited collection Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature (2005), and the highly anticipated forthcoming work of Dorothy Wang and Elda Tsou. There are many important questions at this juncture. What would it mean to approach Asian American literary texts as aesthetic objects rather than sociohistorical documents? How might one produce a formal definition of Asian American literature without resorting to the inadequate identitarian notion of Asian American literature as simply literature produced by Asian Americans? What specific political interventions are works of literature best suited to make? And finally, how can we reconcile the aims of formal analysis, which has traditionally eschewed attention to sociohistorical matters, with the political objectives of Asian American literary criticism as formulated by its pioneers, who harbored a deep-seated suspicion of the Eurocentric biases encoded in the ideology of the aesthetic?

Partridge approaches these and other questions by examining contemporary Chinese American literature through the lens of reception theory. Key to his account is the notion that readerly experience is inevitably conditioned by a “horizon of expectations” that differs from one interpretive community to another. In the study’s first section, Partridge analyzes promotional copy, dust jackets, and other marketing devices in an effort to show how the publishing industry has constructed an orientalist horizon of expectations that effectively consigns Chinese American literature to an ethnic ghetto, the “literary Chinatown” of Partridge’s title. As a result, mainstream readers come to Chinese American literature expecting autoethnographic tales of exoticism, intergenerational conflict, ethnic identitarian anguish, and immigrant struggle. One of the pleasures of Partridge’s book consists in watching him calmly dismantle the orientalist assumptions of various pieces of promotional copy. (He dispatches with a particularly irritating Kirkus review of David Wong Louie, for instance, in one ruthlessly efficient paragraph.) Partridge thus substantiates Asian American literary criticism’s long-standing suspicions about the publishing industry’s enthusiasm for Asian American writing. In its orientalizing zeal, Partridge contends, the publishing industry has helped to construct a weak multiculturalism that condescends to minorities, fetishizes essentialized versions of their cultures, and profits from the whole affair by inviting mainstream consumers to feast in dumb wonder at the dazzling buffet table of cultural diversity.

In the remainder of the book, Partridge aims to show how Chinese American writers have worked against the horizon of expectations established by the publishing industry, thereby pointing their readers “beyond literary Chinatown” and helping to construct a critical polyculturalism that, unlike the weak multiculturalism propagated by the literary marketplace, insists on the dynamism of history, the fluidity of ethnic categories, and the necessity of political struggle. Claiming that the horizon of expectations constructed by the publishing industry is “intentionally contradicted by Chinese American authors” (16), Partridge deploys a series of methodical close readings to suggest some alternative contexts in which Chinese American writers might usefully be read. Thus we get careful examinations of Li-Young Lee’s treatment of eating and his implicit dialogue with American Romanticism; Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s efforts to frustrate the conventional immigration narrative by “claiming diaspora” (99); Louie’s use of baseball as an implicit racial signifier; Shawn Wong’s experiments with ludic reading; and Gish Jen’s adventures in cultural hybridity and polyculturalism. By thus asserting the agency of the text, Partridge significantly diverges from the tenets of reception theory as put forth by, for example, Stanley Fish, whose insistence on the authority of the interpretive community once traumatized a Johns Hopkins undergraduate so badly that she felt compelled to demand of another professor in the same department, “Is there a text...