Toward a Critical Race Narratology

With a great deal of ambition, Stephen Hong Sohn’s Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds attempts to extend radically the terrain of Asian American literary studies. Perhaps its most crucial intervention is its archive of texts, which is remarkable both for its breadth as well as for the logic that justifies it. What immediately strikes any reader familiar with this particular field of inquiry is that Sohn’s choice of textual examples is vastly different from those in other major studies of Asian American fiction. Instead of the usual suspects, Sohn gravitates toward writers whose very status as Asian American has been called into question because their formal strategies fundamentally depart from the autobiographical or memoiristic modes that have become associated with Asian American writing. It is no accident that Sohn is drawn to these texts: the focus of his study, and the characteristic that inheres in his titular term “racial asymmetries,” is the phenomenon in Asian American fiction of the last decade or two in which the position of the Asian American writer is incongruous with the fiction’s central narrative perspective.

Sohn historicizes these fictions in the context of the so-called postrace era. An important implicit question in the study, then, is, How does a genre of writing that has been so rooted in racialized experience deal with a cultural milieu that posits the disappearance of the very characteristic that inspired the genre in the first place? Animated by this question, Sohn’s archive might be characterized as populated by Asian American fictions of the postrace era, which is not one in which race disappears, but rather one, in Sohn’s account, that celebrates liberal multiculturalism while permitting racism to continue in more systemic and invisible modes. The postracial aesthetic adopted by these Asian American writers is thus not one that supports the pervasive fantasy that we somehow live in a moment after race played an important role in American life, but rather in one that critically challenges these complacencies by calling into question the place of the author in relation to his or her fictional world. For Sohn, cross-ethnoracial storytelling viewpoints alert us to questions of social inequality in comparative ways. So although the focus of the study expands beyond what might be regarded as the canon for Asian American fiction, the book is not as interested in supplanting that history as it is in supplementing it.

Concentrating on first-person narratives, Racial Asymmetries focuses much of its theoretical energy on questions of narratology. Indeed, one way of conceiving of the overall project of the book is as an attempt to articulate the possibility of a kind of critical race narrative theory. By attending to questions of narrative perspective, specifically in cases in which there is a disconnect between the ancestral background of the narrator and that of the writer, the book asks a deeper set of questions about the way in which sociohistorical context abides in the formal features of certain literary texts. In fact, my primary criticism of Racial Asymmetries is that these narrative theory questions might have been made more central, as part of a larger engagement and critique of narratology and how its often structuralist practices have traditionally mirrored, perhaps uncomfortably, liberal humanist universalisms. Turning at points throughout the text to Dorrit Cohn, Monika Fludernik, and Kalle Pihlainen, Sohn’s book implicitly asks, What happens when the abstractions of narrative theory, the textual features usually parsed and taxonomized as discrete phenomena and effects, are instead held in dialectical relationship to more positioned, less abstracted social histories? How does a transhistorical category like the narrator, for example, behave in more irreducibly contingent environments? So although Racial Asymmetries is tangentially and implicitly an intervention in narrative theory, this reader wonders what a more thorough and explicit theorization of these terms might yield. To the book’s credit, however, it is the quality of the argument that opens up these potential directions.

The first two chapters of...