Rethinking the Hyphen: Asian North American and European Ethnic Texts as Global Narratives

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 32, no. 3, 2002 Rethinking the Hyphen: Asian North American and European Ethnic Texts as Global Narratives Eleanor Ty Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the development of Asian American Studies as a discipline and the Asian American movement as a panethnic coalition in the US (Espiritu 10), it has become common to refer to non-white writers in America, more recently in Canada and in Europe, as African American, Asian Canadian, or black British writers. This hyphenated status has been seen as a marker of one’s belonging to two worlds, of one’s hybrid identity, and also criticized as a sign of non-belonging to the mainstream culture (see J. Ling; Bhabha 112; Miki).1 The best-known essay on the topic of Asian American identity is Lisa Lowe’s “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity”which celebrates the heterogenous character of Asian America. Though liberating, Lowe’s paradigm still is still based on difference – within the category of Asian American and against a hegemonic other. The designation Asian American, while meant to be descriptive, presumes that to be just “American ” means the white majority. That is, Asian Americans continue to be excluded from the term “Americans.” The hyphenated terms were good transitional designations for the last few decades of the twentieth century for writers whose works were concerned with “claiming America” as Maxine Hong Kingston’s was, or with exposing the discrimination of mainstream culture’s treatment of ethnic citizens , as Joy Kogawa’s Obasan did in the early 1980s. In the last decade or so, however , I contend that this hyphenated identity is no longer adequate for a more recent and different group of emerging Asian writers whose novels are not primarily concerned with the challenges of assimilation, racial prejudice, or with cultural hybridity. These novels have moved away from the Bildungsroman and the emigration narrative which negotiate problems created by the shift from the originary country to the adopted culture. Many of the novels of Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Arlene Chai, Shyam Selvadurai, Michael Ondaatje, and others, for example, fit uneasily into this hyphenated space of the Chinese American, South Asian Canadian, or the Japanese British category. Canadian Review of American Studies 32 (2002) 240 A number of critics have attempted to redefine the place of these hyphenated Asians, and to describe them in different ways. For example, Sauling Wong employs the term “denationalization,”2 while Shirley Geok-lin Lim finds it helpful to use the categories of “immigrant and diasporic” (290). Instead of identifying them as ethnic, minority, immigrant, diasporic; Asian American, Asian Canadian; Asian British; or Asian Australian , I propose the term “Asian global narratives” as a more appropriate designation for a number of works by these novelists. In an issue of PMLA, Paul Jay notes that English literature is increasingly postnational, whether written by cosmopolitan writers like Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Nadine Gordimer or by a host of lesser known writers working in their home countries or in diasporic communities around the world. (33) He argues that instead of using national categories, English as a discipline ought to emphasize “literature’s relation to the historical process of globalization ” (33). In dealing with narratives by Asians in the diaspora, I contend that “global novelists” or global writing is a more accurate term for works that fall into these three categories: 1. Works that overtly thematize globalization. A good example is Rushdie ’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which playfully deals with the power of rock and roll music and rock stars as a global phenomenon. 2. Works authored by Asians in North America, Britain, or Australia, but whose subject matter have little or nothing to do with the adopted country of the authors. These works are often set in the past and frequently deal with some element of history or political crisis, usually in the country the author is most familiar with. Examples are Ha Jin’s Waiting, set in China from 1962 to the 1980s, Arlene Chai’s The Last Time I Saw Mother whose main narrative is the heroine’s discovery of events which occurred during the Second...