Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric (review)

An edited collection of fourteen original essays, Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric is divided into two major sections. The first provides a much-needed exercise in the discovery and recovery of Asian American voices within local contexts, and the second offers a fine array of challenges to the stereotypical representations of Asian Americans within popular discourses in the mass media. The collection—a valuable resource for scholars interested in Asian American rhetoric—expands the scholarly landscape, providing bibliographies on fiction, nonfiction, and scholarship by and about Asian Americans. Utilizing a cultural-rhetorical studies framework for analysis, all essays confront institutional racism and power-knowledge dynamics that privilege certain ways of knowing and speaking while marginalizing and suppressing others. Even though Asian American rhetoric is currently defined against dominant discourses, its practitioners have aimed to engender transformative meanings and effects within the larger American narrative through situated performances and contextualized discursive strategies. This collection characterizes such strategies as a "rhetoric of becoming," a generative rhetoric that is "always situated in particularizing situations and … always generates new meanings and significations at every discursive turn possible" (323).

Editors LuMing Mao and Morris Young choose the singular "rhetoric" in the book title purposefully, seeking to capture within that term, despite the risks of essentialism, a "systematic, effective use and development by Asian Americans of symbolic resources" deployed in contexts that are "regularly imbued with highly asymmetrical relations of power" (3). The tensions and conflicts resulting from hegemonic power relations are most clearly and interestingly depicted in Haivan V.Hoang's elegant analysis of the use of racial slurs, such as John McCain's use of "gook" to refer to North Vietnamese soldiers, to reinscribe Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners and to ignore the historical processes of racial formation. Hoang proposes articulations of counter-memories as productive ways of responding to the racist discourses, as exemplified by Duc, a local university student belonging to the student organization Vietnamese American Coalition (VAC). Seeking to promote a shared communal activism, Duc shows how the word "gook" encourages a "psychology of racism and racial violence," pointing to the hate crime murders of Vincent Chin and Thien Minh Ly. He also describes the range of responses to McCain's use of "gook," describing the internal conflicts within southern California's Little Saigon community and the VAC at a local university. Hoang argues that Duc's memorial retracing of the term "gook" represents one way of destabilizing the primacy of racism within a sign: "memory is a complex art that entails critically interpreting a sign's past and varied utterances, selectively weaving memorial compositions, and sharing cultural memories to foster social engagement" (81). Counter-memory matters in Asian American rhetoric because it provides a rich venue for participants to undermine hegemonic racial formations.

Other performances of Asian American rhetoric across a variety of contexts are collected in section one, which also comprises a kind of sampler of rhetorics of race and ethnicity. Rory Ong examines three auto-documentaries, describing the challenges of avoiding essentialist portraits and the struggles in developing a transnational Asian American identity within the context of an American empire. Tomo Hattori and Stuart Ching argue against the use of the "between-worlds" trope within national, institutional, and disciplinary spaces because it alienates and excludes by freezing differences. Terese Guinsatao Monberg excavates the rhetorical legacy of Dorothy Laigo Cordova, the founder and executive director of the Filipino American National Historical Society, through an oral history methodology that prioritizes listening rather than seeing. Subhasree Chakravarty critiques North American Hindu nationalist movements that employ an aggressive, exclusivist rhetoric in their reproduction of past events and popular myths. Mira Chieko Shimabukuro recovers through archival research a "resistant ethos" in the response to Japanese mass incarceration during World War II. Robyn Tasaka explores how social location and class influence students' conceptions of themselves as Asian Americans in their autobiographical essays.

Section two illustrates the multivalent tactics for confronting and transforming popular discourses, such as the myths of...