Form and History in Asian American Literary Studies

In the current climate of a “new formalism” in literary studies, Jinqi Ling’s Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (1998) strikes today’s reader as both methodologically ahead of its time and politically reminiscent of a moment when our profession’s faith in the social relevance of literature was in greater evidence.¹ These combined qualities—its mixed stance in the current of the present—make Ling’s book inordinately useful to think with. Proposing to read literary form in its historical context, Ling’s monograph might still be considered the only genuine successor to Elaine Kim’s inaugural Asian American literary history, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to Their Writings and Their Social Contexts (1982), hereby providing a critical realist, nonsociological account of Asian American literary evolution that would seek to break once and for all with the reproduction of “Asian America’s social marginalization in the realm of aesthetics by denying Asian American literature not only its literariness but also its rich human potential” (37). Its interest in the specific properties of the literary text made it something of a sleeper when it appeared during the cultural studies ferment of the 1990s; for that reason, it now has a lot to say to a new generation of Asian Americanists who are turning their minds to the recovery of earlier Asian American literary texts. Because of the Sinocentric tilt of Ling’s canon, the book may appear dated, particularly to scholars working outside of the long 1970s (possibly the only period to which attributions of the existence of an “Asian American literary discourse” might still be believed). But this need not be viewed as a debilitating limit of Ling’s study. Its significant achievement is the modeling of a method of historical formalism that helps address the severe challenge of anachronism posed to the construction of Asian American literary history.

Let me briefly summarize the nature of Ling’s formal and historical commitments, and of what they permit. Ling’s subject matter, Asian American literary realism in the period 1957–80, provides him with the ground for a theoretical argument waged dually against Asian American cultural studies’ neglect of formal considerations and of history. By the latter, Ling means the past as a complex object of knowledge that deserves its due, but also a way of seeing the connections between past and present. These two senses of history are related in that objects are inseparable from our perceptions and uses of them. Indeed, Ling sees the 1990s vogue for stylistically modernist Asian American works as bespeaking a kind of aesthetic formalism that is the flip side of a sociologically transparent reading of realism; the celebration of the avant-gardism of newer literary formations depends upon ceding the treatment of older literature by and large to sociologists (professional or not), whose naïve readings of realist narrative contemporary critics have mistaken for the naivete of the literature itself. In noting the gap between literature’s mimetic claims and the actual results of its representation, Ling’s insistence on treating Asian American realism as a “historically constituted aesthetic phenomenon” (23) sweeps aside, on the one hand, the content-based readings seen to be characteristic of the political valuation of earlier literature for its social function and, on the other hand, the formalism reflected in the celebration of contemporary literature for its anti-essentialist performativity.

For example, in reading John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) within the same frame as Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980)—the two texts serving to bookend his literary period—Ling argues on behalf of the foundational role played by the writers of the 1950s and 1960s in paving the way for the nationalist consciousness of the 1970s. In so doing, he makes better sense of the historical significance of Okada and Louis Chu to an emergent Asian American formation than critics from the 1980s and 1990s, who criticized their political limitations, or the Aiiieeeee! anthologists of the early 1970s, who had...