Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, and: Reimagining the American Pacific: From "South Pacific" to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (review)

Critical interventions in American literary studies by practitioners of minoritized discourses have so revolutionized the field that "American Literature" now connotes a highly contested space where neither the objects nor the objectives of study can be understood singularly or as transparently assumable. Challenges to canonicity and a heightened awareness of representational politics, in combination with the influence of postcolonial studies and transnational theories on the study of U.S. culture, have transformed American literary studies into a field whose boundaries are in constant flux. David Eng's Racial Castration and Rob Wilson's Reimagining the American Pacific exemplify this generative transformation, pointing also to the many directions in which it will continue to move. While Eng's and Wilson's projects are vastly different in orientation and design, they both advance new, improved epistemologies for negotiating the complexities that give meaning to and circulate underneath the sign of "America."

The subtitle of Racial Castration, "Managing Masculinity in Asian America," signals Eng's compelling and multilayered argument, which unfolds in the juxtaposed spaces of Asian American studies, American cultural studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic discourse. Through this innovative constellation of fields and theoretical discourses, Racial Castration offers original readings of representations of Asian American men in works of literature, photography, and film. Eng's persuasive interpretations demand critical acknowledgment of crucial insights into the regulatory norms of sexuality and race shaping U.S. culture and politics. These insights are made available, Eng shows, by creating a place for race in psychoanalytic discourse and a place for psychoanalytic theory in studies traditionally animated by materialist-based understandings of race. Theorizing the histories underwriting Asian American masculinity, Eng clearly demonstrates that desire and anxiety are necessary parts of a critical vocabulary capable of investigating the ways that masculinity is both a managed and managing identificatory category.

Racial Castration takes readers through luminous interpretations of texts by cultural workers as different as Frank Chin and David Henry Hwang to arrive in its epilogue at a sustained inquiry into the spatial metaphors that have organized Asian American studies, and by extension, Americanist inquiries. Anchored by analyses of Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet and R. Zamora Linmark's Rolling the R's, Eng argues here for recognition of the limitations of nation-based frames to address the particularities of Asian American identity formations. Cogently, and unlike most similarly inclined discussions, Eng theorizes a diasporic orientation based on sexuality rather than national origin or race. This closing argument both pulls together the threads of discussion that have constituted the book and punctuates a central theme of Racial Castration, namely, that knowledge "about" Asian America, and the United States more generally, produced without taking sexuality seriously cannot help but be deeply inadequate.

Eng's attention to space as a way of interrogating the domestic focus of Americanist endeavors aligns his work and Rob Wilson's Reimagining the American Pacific. Indeed, as Wilson's title suggests, the respatialization of American studies is central to his project. Taking Hawai‘i as his anchoring geographic and cognitive locale, Wilson radically undermines the tradition, established by such writers as Herman Melville and James Michener, that envisions the Pacific as an untamed paradise ripe for U.S. conquest. Wilson argues for a critical practice that unfolds at the juncture of the "global" and the "local" and demonstrates the rich insights to be garnered from their interplay as it shapes lives and cultural practices. Joining the growing body of scholarship that attends to the transnational dimensions of proximate conditions, Wilson's deployment of the local and the global illuminates the failure of American studies...