Repetition and Race: Asian American Literature After Multiculturalism by Amy C. Tang (review)

For both its practitioners and its detractors, critics have long treated the study of Asian American literature as one under almost perpetual crisis. The not unproblematic polemical essay by Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan titled "Racist Love," published in 1971, asserted that because they did not suffer sustained racial hostility as other marginalized groups did, Asian Americans lacked a distinctive, liberating language; instead, Asian American culture was a "ventriloquist's dummy at worst and at best a parrot" of white culture (qtd. in Tang 7). Some twenty-five years later, Walter Benn Michaels, bugaboo of identity politics in the academy, infamously described Asian American Studies as a field that practiced a "kind of blackface, a performance that produces the image of racialized oppression alongside the reality of economic success" (qtd. in 38). While speaking to very different political and intellectual purposes, all three men echo the sense that Asian American literature, perhaps more than any other literary tradition, can't quite wield the cultural power to warrant serious study and reflection. The critical response to this anxiety has been varied, and the most recent turn in Asian Americanist literary criticism has been the formalist turn, of which Amy Tang is a signal example. That Chin, Chan, and Michaels all appear early on in Tang's book is not at all coincidental since they form hermeneutic bookends slightly outside the frame of the historical moment in which Asian American literature and its critics finds themselves, a moment that Tang seeks to tease out.

If Chin and Chan bemoan the lack of a robust Asian American literary discourse even as they hold out hope for some revolutionary potential, Michaels is insistent that the very enterprise of Asian American writing, of writing as Asian Americans, is a political cul-de-sac. What is in the frame for Tang, and what Asian American literature and Asian Americanist criticism index, is what she calls "liberal multiculturalism": a worldview now firmly ensconced in the study and teaching of American culture, and one that serves to "legitimate, as much as challenge, dominant institutions" (1). For Tang, Asian Americans and their literature are firmly and anxiously lodged within these institutions; the result is the production of a formal narrative structure of repetition as an expression of this racial anxiety. Tang argues for repetition as "an equivocal structure that draws together progress and return, motion and statis, agency and subjection, creativity and compulsion" (3). To this extent, Tang's study offers the caveat that Asian American literature is far more vexed and ambivalent (and less progressive) than its critics wish to admit, in ways that mirror the ambivalent status of multiculturalism itself as an expression of hegemony rather than its undoing.

Tang employs rather audacious theoretical choices to set her dialectical method in motion, ones that almost border on the ostentatious. In addition to citing Michaels, Tang employs another longstanding critic of so-called identity politics, Wendy Brown, along with Brown's critique of what she calls the "wounded attachments" of various groups' mobilization of injury (13). For Brown, such mobilization prolongs—repeats—rather than ultimately ends such injury. Tang, however, pivots away from Brown's (and other critics') regard of identity politics as trapped in "political paralysis" (15). Instead she makes the compelling case that it is this very stuckness, this repetitive quality, of Asian American identity that prevents it from moving into more liberatory capacities and makes the study of the literature generative and productive. Repetition forms a "locus of restricted agency for Asian American writers navigating the more specific context of liberal multiculturalism as it has been institutionalized in the United States" (22).

In subsequent chapters, Tang focuses on four forms of repetition in her reading of four contemporary Asian American novels: traumatic repetition in Susan Choi's The Foreign Student (1998), pastiche in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange (1997), intertextual repetition in Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker (1995), and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Fifth Book...