Asian American Cultural Production

I don't wanta be a pioneer. Just a writer. Just see my name in a book by me. About things I like writing about, and fuck the pioneers. What've the old pioneers done for us, for me? I'm not even fighting nobody. I just have a few words and they come at me. "Be Chinese, Charlie Chan or a nobody" to the whites and a mad dog to the Chinamans. . . for what? To die and be discovered by some punk in the next generation and published in mimeograph by some college ethnic studies department, forget it.

--Frank Chin, The Year of the Dragon ¹

Contemporary visions of "Asian American cultural production" seem to have little to do with certain earlier incarnations of what might be called Asian American culture. In one sense, the term "cultural production" has a slick and "official" feel that can easily be turned into one of those corporate pronouncements at the end of a television show, movie, or greeting card ("An Asian American Cultural Production brought to you by..."). The appearance of this glossy issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies, published by a well-established university press, and moreover announcing itself ominously as the finale of the "millennial trilogy" seems to indicate much has changed since the days when "Asian American culture" consisted of those "lone pioneers" or few artists collectives laboring to have their work produced by struggling local publishers and playhouses.

In Frank Chin's 1974 play The Year of the Dragon, Fred Eng looks cynically upon both the prospects for his own writing and academic studies of Asian American writers, produced by a group of "punks in the next generation." Happily, much has changed since those words were written, in terms of both mainstream visibility for Asian American culture and interest in scholarship. No longer is the work of Asian Americans relegated to only one kind of "ethnic" forum: M. Night Shyamalan wrote and directed The Sixth Sense, I. M. Pei designed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Lucy Liu joined Charlie's Angels. The academic study of "Asian American culture" also has grown in scope, variety, and prominence, through the hiring of scholars and the development of programs interested in "culture." While we may still think of ourselves as "punks," those of us who work in Asian American studies occupy increasingly visible and powerful positions at prestigious universities, which are themselves increasingly implicated as corporate "knowledge industries." Conservative backlash notwithstanding, this makes our relationship to culture, as well as the culture inside and outside the academy that we ourselves produce, a vexed one.

The projects of reading and assessing culture by "Asian Americans" grow increasingly complicated with these new visibilities. At this particular moment, how do we understand, experience, and analyze the terms of "Asian American culture"? Moreover, what characterizes "Asian American cultural production"? One might begin by reflecting upon the legacy of activist Asian American "cultural nationalism" as well as contemporary theories of "culture," evident in contemporary readings of "Asian American culture."

Culture and Nationalism

That "culture" has long been a contested term is evident in Raymond Williams's survey of its changing status as a "keyword." The modern sense of the term has its roots in the eighteenth century, where in French, German, and English uses the term was roughly synonymous with "civilization." At the end of the eighteenth century, Herder attacked this usage for assuming that Europe represented the pinnacle of human achievement: he proposed to speak of "cultures" in the plural, referring both to national and subnational cultures. The Romantics seized upon this distinction in their valorization of folk culture, crossing the divide between high and low art. Toward the end of the Romantic movement in the mid-nineteenth century, the German word "Kultur" reclaimed the association with high art and European civilization. The term "culture" now carries...