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

David Leiwei Li’s Imagining the Nation frames its reading of the different practices and politics of contemporary Asian American literature with an exceptionally insightful discussion of Asian Americans’ contradictory place in the national imaginary. Post–1965 Asian American culture marks a change from an earlier century of Orientalist discourse and Asian exclusion from U.S. citizenship. But however lauded as the “model minority,” contemporary Asian Americans remain emblematic of the contradictions of the American nation; although identical to “authentic” citizens under law, they remain defined as aliens. Li’s compelling readings explore this paradox by addressing issues of political representation, authorial authority, and literary institution, as well as aesthetic choice.

Li traces three phases of Asian American literary production: “‘the ethnic nationalist phase’ of the 1960s and early 1970s”; “‘the feminist phase,’ starting with its signature piece, The Woman Warrior, in 1976 and going through the 1980s, during which Asian American texts proliferated and received increasing academic legitimation”; and the current “‘heteroglossia’. . . that coincides with the influence of market multiculturalism and the steady professionalization of Asian American critics” (186). These phases, however, are far from mutually exclusive in their articulations. For instance, the ethnic nationalism expressed by the editors of Aiiieeeee! and the “verbal snarl and stampede” (42) of Frank Chin are not the only impulses to “claim America”; constructing American identities also drives the revision of ethnic nationalism in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, the reworking of immigrant narrative in Bharati Muhkerjee’s Jasmine, and the concern with possessive individualism in Gish Jen’s Typical American. The “second phase” is emblematized by The Woman Warrior’s literary visibility; yet Kingston’s gestures towards transnational diaspora, the “dual geography” of “America” and “Asia,” become reconfigured in works as disparate as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, David Mura’s Turning Japanese, Frank Chin’s Donald Duk, and Fae Ng’s Bone.

Li uses Kristeva’s formulation of the abject “both as a bodily scheme and as a border-setting mechanism” (10) to imagine different articulations of Asian American literary sensibility. Each of his readings, including one about “transvestic desire” in David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly and another that examines the “transpirational” manuevers in David Wong Louie’s collection Pangs of Love, stresses the flexibility and dynamism of Asian American racial formation as well as the constraints of literary practice: “[F]or whom does the Asian American author write, and in what social and institutional contexts?” (16) There are no surprising additions to the Asian American canon here, for Li’s argument is perhaps best sustained by the contradictions embodied by the better-known Asian American writers of the past three decades. Yet Li’s informed and valuable study might well serve as a point of departure for other studies, ones that extend the ethnic, geographical, and historical range of “Asian America” as well as other areas of American literary history.