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2 _ Autonomy and Representation Aesthetics and the Crisis of Asian American Cultural Politics in the Controversy over Blu’s Hanging MARK CHIANG A T ITS ANNUAL CONVENTION IN 1998, held in Honolulu, Hawai’i, the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) presented a Fiction Award to Lois-Ann Yamanaka for her novel, Blu’s Hanging. Immediately following the presentation, though, a resolution was introduced to rescind the award, based on the charge that Yamanaka’s work contains stereotypical or racist depictions of Filipinos. The Honolulu convention was perhaps the most tumultuous in the short history of the AAAS (which was founded in 1979). The atmosphere was highly charged and many had a sense that the events taking place could mean the end of the Association. During a special emergency plenary session, supporters and critics of Yamanaka read statements followed by a general discussion. At the presentation of the award itself, three Filipina students from the high school where Yamanaka teaches writing accepted the award on her behalf while many members of the audience, wearing black armbands, stood up and turned their backs to the stage. The vote was conducted by secret ballot, and the resolution passed by the vote of 91 to 55. The award was withdrawn. In the wake of these events, their lessons remain unclear. My argument here is that the conflicts over Blu’s Hanging were so traumatic precisely because they brought to the surface a number of contradictions in the critical orthodoxy of Asian American literary studies and called into question some of the most basic assumptions of the field. The protests against the Fiction 18 \ A S I A N A M E R I C A N C R I T I C A L D I S C O U R S E I N A C A D E M I A Award sought to raise questions concerning the marginalization of Filipino Americans in the AAAS and in the field of Asian American Studies, and they did prompt the Association to make efforts to redress those problems. The pressing cultural questions raised by the controversy, though, have largely been ignored. In taking up the call to rethink the question of aesthetics, I want to suggest that the intractability of the issues raised by the protests over Blu’s Hanging are closely connected to the neglect of aesthetics in Asian American literary studies. While many Asian Americanist critics have employed various kinds of formal analysis and “close reading’’ as part of their method, I would agree with Sue-Im Lee that literary aesthetics has been a “missing category’’ in Asian American literary discourse.1 I want to approach aesthetics, though, as the question of the categorical construction of literature as a distinct kind of writing. In other words, political criticism in Asian American literary studies has tended to discount the specificity of the literary to the extent that the field now has no account of why people continue to perceive literature as different from other kinds of writing. To simply say that they should not see it as different is to ignore the entire apparatus by which that perception is reproduced. The conflicts over Blu’s Hanging hinged importantly on the question of the book’s status as literature, and it was in this juncture, it seems to me, that Asian American literary theory faltered. Faced with the question of what it means that a literary text was being charged with racial stereotyping, the field has had no response, either affirmative or negative, except for a rather surprising recourse to conventional liberal axioms of artistic value. Is it possible to see in the Blu’s Hanging episode something else besides an affirmation of the transcendence of “literature’’ or evidence of its essential fraudulence? In this essay, I want to focus specifically on the issues concerning culture and literature that were brought up by these events. In particular, I want to investigate how those who defended the choice of the award committee employed a discourse of artistic freedom and literary value in order to counter the charges of racism. Such a ready adoption of dominant liberal notions of the aesthetic as a domain apart from politics seemed to sit uneasily with the socially conscious traditions of Asian American cultural production. The category of the aesthetic is a crucial site of philosophical inquiry in the development of modernity because it speaks, among other things, to the constitution of the individual and the formation of...

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