Double agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture (review)

Tina Chen's Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture is a literary-critical tour de force that proposes a hermeneutics of Asian American subjectivity and identity through the trope of impersonation. The title's play on the term, "double agent," references Cold War era-derived anxieties about Asian stealth and shiftiness while reworking racist linkages between Asian-raced peoples and espionage. In her readings of a wide variety of cultural productions, Chen eschews both 1970s cultural-nationalist claims to authenticity and 1990s theories of performativity developed by (white) gender and queer theorists. In doing so, she develops a critical framework for reconsidering Asian American racial formation in ways that transcend static models of culture and cultural transmission, on the one hand, and materially-unmoored celebrations of identity performance, on the other.

In Part I of the book, titled "Impersonation and Stereotype," Chen notes that impersonation (especially of racist caricatures) as economic and social survival strategy has been a site of ambivalence for Asian America given that Asian American people have historically been coerced into adopting and displaying behaviors that are discomfiting precisely because they uphold and maintain damaging ideas about racial minorities. But rather than condemn impersonation as a practice that emerges solely out of racial subjugation, Chen chooses to reclaim it both as a mode of literary-critical analysis and as a site of agency, arguing that Asian American subject formation itself arises from an ongoing process of performing assumed roles that complicate notions of an authentic or true identity. Creating a distinction between "impersonation" and a related term, "imposture," Chen avers that, whereas imposture strives to effect a seamless and convincing counterfeit for the purposes of deception, impersonation involves "the assumption of a public identity that does not necessarily belong to 'someone else' but that has been assigned to and subsequently adopted by the performer in question in order to articulate an identity comprehensible to the public" (14). In the acts of impersonation that Chen reads, we find Asian American subjects who—in turn—acknowledge the multiple allegiances and affiliations that lie always at the heart of identity-as-process.

This model of imposture and its relationship to stereotype manifests itself in Chen's readings of the Fu Manchu novels and films of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Sax Rohmer's fictional villain is an emblematic figure of white anxieties about Asian masculinity, sexuality, and "mimicry of Western imperial agency" (57). As a character that emerges out of its creator's immersion in the yellowface minstrel circuit of the early twentieth century, Fu Manchu at once embodies the stereotypes of both the feminized and the hyper-heterosexual Asian-raced man. However, Chen cautions her readers to avoid making sweeping condemnations of the body of cultural productions that feature Fu Manchu, stating that these portrayals are far from being uniformly stable in their alignment with hegemonically conceived ideas about race.

The following chapter takes up these same concerns about stereotype as a crucial site of meditation in later twentieth-century Asian American-authored plays. Readings of Elizabeth Wong's "China Doll," David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die, and Diana Son's "R.A.W. ('Cause I'm a Woman)" form the basis of Chen's argument that the myriad and varied range of racist caricature is not uniformly a source of victimization for Asian Americans but can also be a basis for politically informed coalition building among Asian American subjects. That these potentially liberating transformations in the performance of stereotype take place within the literal space of the theater is significant for it literalizes the act of assuming, embodying, and—ultimately—revolutionizing previously scorned and injurious archetypes.

Part II of Chen's book, titled "Double Agents, Double Agency," takes the reader away from the scene of literal performance (i.e., the cinema or the stage) and transposes her critical framework onto the genre of the novel. Departing, also...