Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. For parallel beginnings of Asian American Studies and Asian American community activism, see Glenn Omatsu’s “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s” in Asian American Studies: A Reader, ed. Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Min Song (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000). The convergent interest of Asian American literary criticism and Asian American political activism is announced in the centrality of the phrase “claiming America” or “reclaiming America” in both fields of discourse. 2. Consider the recurrence of key concepts in recent Asian American critical monographs : Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); David Leiwei Li’s Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Wendy Ho, In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American MotherDaughter Writing (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1999); Rachel C. Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1999); Sheng-mei Ma, The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Leslie Bow, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Morris Young, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives As a Rhetoric of Citizenship (Carbondale , IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004). 204 \ N O T E S 3. In centrally locating the aesthetic in the analysis of Asian American literature, this volume responds to, and expands upon, earlier Asian American literary criticism that invites a formal, figurative, and intertextual emphasis in the reading of Asian American literature. Identifying a lack of formal and figurative analysis in current Asian American criticism, King-Kok Cheung’s Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993) attends to the narrative strategies in Asian American writing by women. Cheung emphatically states that just as it is important to exercise historical and social perspectives in reading Asian American literature, “it is equally important not to drown Asian American texts in context” (14). Sau-ling Wong’s Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) likewise insists on the equal significance of “contexts” and “intertexts” in developing a reading strategy for Asian American literature. While historical knowledge is indispensable, an intertextual reading practice—the highlighting of “choice and praxis” (10)—heightens the way Asian American texts “build upon, allude to, refine, controvert, and resonate with each other” (12). Further calls for a heightened awareness of form in the analysis of Asian American literature have been voiced in Shirley Lim’s “Assaying the Gold; or Contesting the Ground of Asian American Literature,” New Literary History 24 (1993): 147–69 and “Reconstructing Asian-American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics,” MELUS 14.2 (1987): 51–63; Patricia Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Rocı́o G. Davis, Transcultural Reinventions : Asian American and Asian Canadian Short-Story Cycles (Toronto: TSAR Publications, 2001). 4. George Levine, “Reclaiming the Aesthetic,” in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994): 1, 3. 5. Michaels’ assertion, which appeared in Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), has functioned as a pivotal declaration for those contesting the reading of literature for oppositional tendencies. In this critical topography, the category of the aesthetic is seen not as forging a relationship with material reality, much less commenting on it; all we can say about the aesthetic is that it is yet another manifestation of the dominant logic of the culture. For instance, Michaels argues, “if ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is for me an exemplary text, it is not because it criticizes or endorses the culture of consumption, but precisely because, in a rigorous, not to say obsessive, way, it exemplifies that culture” (27, original emphasis). Many critics have argued that Michaels’s immanent historicism conceives the “space of culture” as an omnipresent and singular entity; see Brook Thomas, “Walter Benn Michaels and the New Historicism”; Fredric Jameson, “Immanence and Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical Discourse” in Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham:DukeUniversityPress,1991);andCaryWolfe,“AntinomiesofLiberalism: The Politics of ‘Belief’ and the Project of Americanist Criticism,” in Discovering...