Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (review)

Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent. By David Leiwei Li. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998.

David Leiwei Li's Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent affirms the centrality of the United States as the site of Asian American textual negotiation and subject formation. His book examines "contemporary Asian American literary articulations as both compulsory cultural struggles for national legitimacy and production of the national contradiction." (p.12) In framing his study in these terms, Li intervenes in an important debate in the field today, namely, how and why transnational paradigms are relevant to the study of Asian America and whether, and to what extent these paradigms revise the historic mission of Asian American studies, often summarized as the struggle to "claim America." Li engages these issues by focusing on three key questions: "What are the forces behind the unprecedented Asian American literary emergence? What has occasioned its paradigmatic shift from an insistence on the geopolitical centrality of the United States to an eager embrace of the Pacific Rim? What does the changing significance of 'Asian America(n)' say about the nature of the nation and the status of American democracy?" (p. 2)

The great strength of Li's book and his main focus are the first and last questions. In responding to these questions, he provides an original, penetrating, and sophisticated analysis of canon-formation, literary representation, and ethnic agency that makes an important contribution to the field. In particular, his discussions of the ethnic nationalist project of defining Asian American literature, the reception and status of Maxine Hong Kingston's writings and the intertextual linkages between the two are excellent. They bring to the fore Li's skills as a literary critic--sensitivity, astuteness, subtlety, and theoretical acumen. In dealing with the second question, however, Li attempts to engage and resolve the issues raised by the use of transnational and diasporic paradigms by focusing primarily on Arif Dirlik's essay ¹ and treating it as representative of this scholarship. But Dirlik's essay works from an area studies orientation and, hence, is primarily concerned with Asia-Pacific region formation (as clearly signaled by the title of his essay and the subject of the anthology) and only secondarily concerned with the limitations of established modes of Asian American historiography. In addition, Dirlik suggests that the Asia-Pacific context be used to broaden and not replace the established U.S.-centric approach to the study of Asian Americans. Li's analysis might have been strengthened if he had engaged the more relevant and complex arguments of other critics including Kamala Visweswaran and Colleen Lye, whose work demonstrates that the opposition between national and transnational frameworks may finally be unhelpful and represents a false choice. Had Li addressed these and other critics, he might have furthered the debate in the field, which has also emphasized that the inclusion of diasporic and transnational paradigms has been profoundly enabling to many of the underrepresented Asian American groups and, paradoxically, has aided their interpellation as Asian Americans. If we think of the project of constructing Asian American identities as a Janus-faced one, simultaneously looking inward to the heterogeneous groups within the constituency and outward to the shifting meanings of American identity in national and global contexts, we may be less apt to see the salience of diasporic perspectives as undercutting its politically transformative potential. The need to use diasporic or transnational paradigms in certain contexts has been advanced as an historical argument to enable political critique, not as a metanarrative for Asian American subject formation. In fact, Li's chapters on David Mura and Fae Myenne Ng are fine examples of the historically-grounded working out of such possibilities.

Li's discussions of Asian American literature are contextualized within a genealogy of American orientalism that maps the shift in Asian American subject positions from oriental alienation (1854...