The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (review)

Caroline Rody argues that contemporary fiction by and about Asian Americans makes a vital contribution to American literature as a whole in its willful engagement with ethnic others of various kind. In this, it is both a part of a larger trend and its leading practitioner. To support this argument, Rody focuses on three representative novels: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Gish Jen’s Mona and the Promised Land, and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange. In each of the chapters dedicated individually to these novels, Rody investigates the ways in which they explore the complexities of social contact with others outside their group, from Korean American–African American cultural interaction, as in the first example, to Chinese American–Jewish American suburban exchanges and North-South global trafficking of ideas, peoples, goods, and cultures. Rody broadens the reach of these text-specific readings with what she calls “interchapters,” a term that mimics the main theme of the book. The first of these examines the ways in which African Americans have figured in a broad sampling of Asian American literary texts, while the second examines the ways in which Jewish Americans and Jewishness have been portrayed by a slightly smaller number of such texts. The book concludes with a shorter survey of works that focus on multiracial characters, with a special emphasis on the figure of hapa children.

In these various chapters, which range from close attention to specific texts and surveys of large bodies of works, Rody weaves together a critical multicultural perspective with one focused specifically on Asian American literature. The former is indebted to Werner Sollors’s work on ethnicity, which both insists on its centrality as opposed to attention to race and troubles its integrity as a coherent concept. This attitude toward the ethnic shapes Rody’s own views on how to understand the play of identities that she focuses on, eschewing discussion of race to focus on the subject of ethnicity and the ways in which its meaning enters into flux in these narratives. The latter perspective favors the work of critics like Sau-ling Wong, King-Kok Cheung, Elaine Kim, Patricia P. Chu, and Daniel Kim, all of whom are notable for their dedication to placing literature at the center of their attention, even when they also include, as Elaine Kim did in her pioneering work, consideration of social contexts. While Rody also draws productively from more poststructural forms of criticism, she does so with some skepticism. In considering the ways in which David Palumbo-Liu and Kandice Chuh critique “the privileging of plots of individualist ascent” in her chapter on Mona and the Promised Land, for instance, she insists that readings influenced by this critique might not appreciate the “genius of Jen’s project,” which relies on a portrait of “dialogic, comparativist, intersubjective acculturation” (92).

The book’s central contribution to these ongoing conversations is thus in its desire to shore up the primacy of the literary as the central object of literary study. It does this by privileging careful attention to the text and celebrating the accomplishments of individual authors. Such attentiveness yields wonderful insights into the fiction under discussion, and does so in a lively style that can be a pleasure to read. It is also a delight to read the work of a critic who so clearly enjoys the works she writes about, and wants to share what makes these works enjoyable with a larger audience. At the same time, this attentiveness provides concrete support for the larger claim the book wants to make. One of the most memorable articulations of this claim is found in the introduction: “what I term the ‘horizontal plot’ opens for them [the characters in Asian American novels] an axis of interethnic desire through which intersubjective play, borrowing, imitation, comparison, challenge, dialogue, or mirroring can be libratory, even redemptive. The horizontal plot provides...