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  • Literary Criticism Book Award 2011

Submitted by Victor Bascara, Robert Ji-Song Ku, and Eleanor Ty

Winner:

Erin Khuê Ninh, Ingratitude. (New York University Press)

Erin Khuê Ninh’s Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature is an exemplary work of Asian American Studies scholarship, a model of rigorous and realized literary criticism. With purpose and lucid intelligence, Ninh very successfully takes up the significant challenge of coming to terms with the pervasive and oft-discussed trope of kinship and generational conflict in Asian American literature. She revitalizes the trope by “reading the immigrant nuclear family as a special form of capitalist enterprise” where the end result is a filial child who is a doctor, lawyer and model minority (2). While the tendency of Asian American scholars in the last twenty years has been to examine and critique (with justification) externally imposed racialization and stereotype, media productions of Asianness and other systemic forms of racism (4), Ninh focuses on “power in the most intimate, vulnerable, and formative of social contexts”—the Asian American family itself. Ninh looks at daughters in the works of Jade Snow Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Evelyn Lau, Catherine Liu, Fae Myenne Ng, and Chitra Divakaruni discussing topics such as disownment, suffering, harm, imprisonment, and surveillance. The genius of the book lies in its unpredictability and counter-intuitiveness. With conceptual nuance and insight, Ninh’s book critically synthesizes notions of affect, historical materialism, and Asian American cultural politics in a sustained and elegantly written work of generative scholarship.

Honorable Mentions:

Julia H. Lee—Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937. (New York University Press)

Julia Lee’s Interracial Encounters provides a welcome consideration of the convergences of African American and Asian Asian marginalisation and exclusion through the study of texts in a period that merits greater attention, the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. The so-called “negro problem” and the “yellow peril” were both discourses that arose from the “perceived deviances from [End Page 329] whiteness” (32), and were influential in shaping popular culture, legal and political discourses. Lee discusses a wide range of genres—songs, cartoons, films, memoirs, novels, and moments of racial encounters on a train to look at the complex terrain of U.S. culture in this period. Revealing the critical synergy between Asian American and African American texts of the period, Lee’s work reminds us to look beyond Asian American texts to understand the racial politics of America.

Rocío G. Davis. Relative Histories: Mediating History in Asian American Family Memoirs. (University of Hawaii Press)

Rocío Davis examines the family memoir, specifically those that tell the story of at least three generations of the same family, as a means of creating collective memories. The book is provocatively set up as a dialectical consideration of how history is experienced through generations of families and how Asian American memoirs are therefore a medium of historical knowledge production. What is impressive about Davis’s book is its exploration of canonical and lesser-known memoirs that deal not only with important historical events, such as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Korean and Vietnamese wars, but also those that depict unusual family immigration patterns, such as Jael Silliman’s account of the Baghadadi Jews’ settlement and acculturation to India; Mira Kamdar’s description of her Indian family’s settlement in Burma; and Davis’ own transnational family which include a great-grandfather from Missouri who went to the Philippines as a soldier, a Belgian/German grandmother, and a Spanish Filipina maternal great-grandmother. Davis’s book shows the intricate weaving of colonization, travel, trade, and migration on Asian American families that is revealed through her fine close readings of family memoirs.

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