Writing the Ghetto: Class, Authorship, and the Asian American Ethnic Enclave

Conclusion: The Postracial Aesthetic and Class Visibility

Conclusion: The Postracial Aesthetic and Class Visibility At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Nam, the narrator of Nam Le’s short story , “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” is surrounded by white classmates who resent ethnic literature. To them, ethnic literature is a sell-out genre. One student remarks: “Faulkner, you know . . . said we should write about the old verities. Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. . . . [T]hat’s why I don’t mind your work, Nam. Because you could just write about Vietnamese boat people all the time. . . . You could totally exploit the Vietnamese thing” (10).One need only possess an ethnic body that channels an ethnic story in order to gain professional accolades and good sales. His classmates sniff: “I’m sick of ethnic lit. . . . It’s full of descriptions of exotic food,” and “You can’t tell if the language is spare because the author intended it that way, or because he didn’t have the vocab” (9). Nam, a Vietnamese Australian, remains quiet vis-à-vis his classmates’ assessments. He eschews ethnic writing himself, in tacit agreement that it would be too easy to exploit, in his case, “the Vietnamese thing” (10). Nam’s friend teases: “How could you have writer’s block? Just write a story about Vietnam” (10). Ethnic literature is not good literature, just expedient literature. Genuinely good writers, Nam’s friend opines, hew to the “old verities.” rather than “writ[ing] about Vietnamese boat people all the time” (10).1 Good literature is postracial. The postracial in Asian American literature can be described as literature written by Asian American writers that does not contain Asian American characters or address Asian American experiences. The 202 / conclusion absence of ethnic characters or experiences in literature by ethnic authors is not new or particularly alarming. But of interest is postracial literature that is characterized by the deliberate abnegation of ethnic content. This rejection frees the author from the ostensible shackles of ethnic particularity and difference to examine transcendent, universal themes, like “love and honor and pity.” For Asian American authors, the postracial more specifically frees them from writing Orientalist caricatures and reductive ethnographies—from the “Chinatown book.” The postracial is a mode of freedom from the ethnographic imperative. The freedom conveyed by the postracial aesthetic is both a problem and a subversion. The problem of the postracial is that it intensifies the effacement of class. Insofar as race and class are inextricable, the absence of race in works by Asian American authors is likely accompanied by the absence of class.2 In addition, as a form of freedom from the ethnographic imperative, the postracial aesthetic iterates the effacement of class. Freedom from the ethnographic imperative, and its retooling of class as culture, suggests freedom from the class effacements of this retooling. Class is perhaps given the space to be articulated. However, this does not bear out because the postracial aesthetic generally untethers Asian American writers from the ethnographic imperative by simply dropping attention to race and culture. It thereby tends to drop attention to related matters of class. Class is freed from being reconfigured through the ethnographic imperative’s culturalizations, but is not necessarily addressed, and more likely forgotten again. Of central concern here is that the postracial aesthetic is misleadingly nonmimetic. If race is poor literary material, the postracial aesthetic suggests that race is immaterial , that race is obsolete as an organizing—and damaging—structure of social life. Class inequity is excised as one of race’s obsolete damaging effects. The postracial aesthetic is also a post-class aesthetic that suggests that class inequities produced by race have been surmounted. At the same time, the postracial makes class more plain, more visible as a constitutive element of ethnic writing and ethnic life. The freedom from the ethnographic imperative that the postracial bestows enables a refusal to write reductive ethnographies. Claiming a postracial aesthetic can be a rejection of the multiculturalist literary market in which the “Chinatown book” so profitably circulates. This profitable circulation has a class inflection—the resentment of ethnic literature is a form of class anxiety. In Le’s short story, Nam’s classmates resent ethnic literature not only because of chauvinistic aesthetic evaluations, but also because it sells. A hot topic of gossip is a “substantial six-figure conclusion / 203 contract” offered to a Chinese national who writes about immigration (8...