Literary Criticism

Committee: Mark Jerng (chair), Timothy Yu, Patricia Chu

Asian American Studies Literary Criticism Book Award

This year’s outstanding class of nominees represented three of the most important, exciting directions in the field. First, we encountered new, rigorous comparative frameworks for Anglophone and Sinophone literatures, built upon translation and reception histories, that should inspire new research on the transnational circuits between Asian American and Asian literatures. Second, we observed post-colonial approaches to Asian American studies that rethink the status of nation, the Americas, the Pacific Rim, and the crucial roles of sexuality and gender in these formations. Finally, we saw a renewal of formalism and attention to the ways in which poetics shape the relationship between the racialized Asian American subject and such categories as author, text, reader, form, and history.

We chose to give an honorable mention to Denise Cruz’s Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012), which draws upon romance novels, autobiographies, popular magazines, and other archival materials to create a rich, deeply contextualized account of the modern Filipina as a transpacific figure central to the formation of Philippine national identity. Cruz’s pathbreaking, fresh archive will inspire new research. She places women, class, and race at the heart of a new Filipina/o literary history that will recenter historical accounts of colonialism and nationalism in the Philippines. Her lively voice and elegant readings will draw readers to the understudied literary canon she limns. And deftly, she shows us how to analyze the “travels” of the transpacific Filipina across a diverse archive, across diverging and converging political moments, and across distinct conditions of colonial and postcolonial formations.

Our winner is Christopher Lee’s The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature (Stanford University Press, 2012). In Semblance, Lee grapples with a crucial yet deeply vexing topic, the problem of realism, identity politics, and the proper “subject” haunting Asian American studies. Shedding new light on the problem of representational politics, he frames and analyzes the “idealized critical reading subject” at the core of our work as critics. In readings of Eileen Zhang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, and Michael Ondaatje, Lee boldly engages with the problem that the critique of identity politics poses to the very foundations of Asian American literary studies. “[I]nstead of just trying to extricate ourselves from identity politics,” he writes, “the more difficult challenge of hating it properly requires critiquing its limits while holding onto its liberatory possibilities.” Lee’s theoretical grounding provides insight into the complex intersections of literary representation and Asian American subjects across a range of challenging, teachable literary texts; his book skillfully outlines the terms of this debate for the next generation of scholars.

We congratulate both authors on their significant achievements.