Introduction to Focus: Essential Asian American Literature

The title of this issue promises something that it has no intention of delivering: a definition of "Asian American literature." The concepts "essential" and "definition" are interlocked, as the meaning of "definition" is "a precise statement of the essential nature of a thing, stating exactly what a thing is" (Oxford English Dictionary). So to ask, "What exactly is 'Asian American literature'?" is the same as asking, "What exactly is the essential nature of 'Asian American literature'?" Who, among the scholars, readers, and teachers of Asian American literature today, would like to answer this question?

I imagine the stampede to the door would be considerable. That definitional approach, in its current formation, is fundamentally flawed. It postulates Asian American literature as a thing, a material object or an item in existence that, properly accessed and accounted for, will yield the essential nature of its thing-ness. This definitional approach justifies the search for that eternal, fundamental quality—the essence—of Asian American literature. Relatedly, this static formulation highlights another criterion of definition: "to determine the boundary or spatial extent of; to settle the limits of." When this criterion for the determinate boundary is applied, the definition of Asian American literature becomes an exercise in sociological inclusion and exclusion: who "counts" as Asian American? What nationalities, ethnicities, and histories are included in defining Asian American?

Surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly at all, this static formulation underpins the most influential and controversial definition of Asian American literature. In one of the earliest scholarship on Asian American literature, Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), editors Frank Chin et. al offer a definition of Asian American literature, identity, and sensibility with the surety, defiance, and certitude of describing a thing whose stability as an entity out-there is unquestionable, whose essence is discernible in the commonality of that entity, and whose boundaries are clearly demarcated. There is a distinct "Asian American sensibility" that is "not Chinese or Japanese and distinctly not white American"; Asian American literature is that which is written by "Filipino, Chinese, Japanese Americans, American born and raised." Thus, the exemplar Asian Americans in Aiiieeeee! are American-born (but not "Americanized") males of Filipino, Chinese, or Japanese national origins.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that a central task of Asian American scholarship in the 1980s and 90s has been to overturn this definition. Numerous anthologies, monographs, and feminist scholarships announced their impetus as the politics of inclusion of expanding the boundary of Asian American literature to encompass different ethnic origins, nationalities, sexualities, genders, and histories. Moreover, as scholars highlighted the different legal and material histories through which individuals are interpellated as Asian Americans, politics of inclusion were accompanied by a politics of difference, best represented by Lisa Lowe's rally for Asian American scholarship to recognize the "heterogeneity, hybridity, multiplicity" fundamental to any large-scale social category.

This trajectory away from essentialist definition is a well-known fact in the historiography of Asian American scholarship, and I bring it up to serve two purposes: one, to reframe Aiiieeeee!'s essentialist definition as a demonstration of the way minority literature must attain legitimacy through the static nature of its definition; and two, to point out the fact that this static definition still exerts a powerful pull in Asian American scholarship. As one of the first scholarship on an unknown category of literature, Aiiieeeee!'s definition must be understood within the rhetoric of justification and legitimation. It must be read as the explicit answer to the implicit political and institutional demand for minority literature to justify its status as a legitimate entity upon the criterion of thing-ness: "state exactly what a thing is." Thus, in presenting its subject so qualitatively ("Asian American sensibility") and quantitatively fixed, bounded, and stable (American-born Filipino, Chinese, Japanese), Aiiieeeee!'s definition of Asian American literature actually answers those demands very proficiently.

That this proficiency, enacted in the early 70s, eventually becomes the cautionary tale of essentialism in Asian American historiography is indicative of the altered political and institutional status of Asian American literary scholarship. But my second argument is that even in...