National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage, and: Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (review)

Both of these theoretically sophisticated books expand the boundaries of Asian American cultural criticism. The significant differences in their projects signal contrasting directions in the field. Shimakawa's National Abjection is more polished in many ways than Nguyen's Race and Resistance, but it also remains largely within the theoretical terrain already staked out by Lisa Lowe and David Palumbo-Liu. Race and Resistance is a more conflicted book but with greater ambition in its attempt at a reflexive critique of Asian American studies. Together, these works locate, as Nguyen indicates in his introduction, some of the tensions accompanying the institutionalization of Asian American studies during its rapid growth over the past decade.

National Abjection focuses primarily on Asian American drama and performance, a relatively understudied area, discussing various aspects of Asian American theater primarily in terms of Kristeva's concept of abjection. Shimakawa argues that Asian Americans have been included in the United States as the necessary other that constitutes the American national body, and since the process of abjection is largely visual, the theater offers an important site where it might be destabilized. Chapter 1 provides an extended discussion of the various controversies sparked by Miss Saigon. Chapter 2 presents a valuable history of the formation of Asian American theater companies, including the author's interviews with several founding directors and performers. Shimakawa only cites fragments of the interviews, though, and I found myself wishing for more.

In subsequent chapters, Shimakawa examines the work of such playwrights as Wakako Yamauchi, Jeannie Barroga, Philip Kan Gotanda, Frank Chin, Velina Hasu Houston, and David Henry Hwang. While Shimakawa offers new insights on these writers, much of her discussion covers fairly familiar ground. National Abjection does venture into new territory, though, in the last chapter on Ping Chong, where she pushes hardest at the boundaries of current theory. As an organizing paradigm, abjection seems somewhat limiting, emphasizing mostly the reactive dimensions of texts—their responses to the abjection, or racialization, of Asian Americans rather than the creative or productive aspects of Asian American identity and culture. Indeed, the last chapter is refreshing partly because it breaks away from the issue of abjection.

Despite Shimakawa's stated interest in the subversive possibilities of performance and theater, she tends to treat them mostly in abstract, theoretical terms, with little consideration of theaters as cultural institutions or material spaces. The book's speculations about the political effects of various works tend to be inconclusive, largely because the contexts in which those evaluations might be made are almost entirely unspecified. Considering the relatively uncharted terrain of Asian American theater and performance, though, National Abjection is a welcome addition to this growing body of criticism.

What distinguishes Race and Resistance from most other recent works of Asian American criticism is its interest in the institutional locations of Asian American studies. Nguyen argues that current Asian American literary criticism remains mired in the identity politics of the 1960s, partly as a way of disavowing the fact that Asian American academics have become panethnic entrepreneurs who capitalize upon the symbolic value of racial identity. Thus, Nguyen seeks to move beyond the rigid binaries of identity politics in order to examine the flexible strategies that Asian American critics have had to adopt in order to survive in the American academy and those that Asian American writers have also adopted in their books.

These issues are primarily addressed in Nguyen's introduction and conclusion, however, and the analysis is carried out incompletely in the rest of the book. Beginning with the Eaton sisters and proceeding through Carlos Bulosan, Frank Chin, Le Ly Hayslip, Jessica Hagedorn, and Ninotchka Rosca, [End Page 190...