Editor’s Preface

In our daily lives we tend to inhabit space almost all the time in imperceptible ways. Amidst all the flurry of working, playing, of doing whatever, our minds are oftentimes not attuned to space’s configurations, qualities, even histories. It’s as if our spaces are meant to be this way, to be unnoticeable. We take space for granted, even though we live in it and exist through it. Until, that is, when space’s effects on us become manifest, or when we become intentionally cognizant of the ways we think, act, and live within our space. The five essays in this JAAS issue are invitations for us to pay attention to that which we usually ignore. They are invocations to perceive and read space in its myriad forms, facets, and functions—a way of providing spatial mindfulness and space-conscious analysis of selected elements of Asian American lives.

Our lead essay, James McMaster’s, “‘But You Have to Do Something,’” parses both the form and content of a play—the space of staged performance, if you will—to mine the possibilities of having to deal with public violence. Analyzing Julia Cho’s Office Hour, a theatrical production stirred by the Virginia Tech massacre, McMaster offers the potentials of considering “racialized holding environments” as space-time providers of momentary care and therapy, akin to being in the eye of a storm. One of our reviewers noted that this essay tackles “exceptionally pressing issues that deserve attention from academics in multiple disciplines.” I agree.

Our second piece, “Family Business: The Work of Asian American Child’s Play,” contributed by Tara Fickle, provides a different, but related, reading of “play” not so much as theatrical performance (although indeed it may well be) but as recreational activity. For Fickle, however, her analysis of selected Asian American texts points to recreation’s deeper, more provocative, reference not merely to its evocation of an enjoyable activity, but rather to the intersecting activities of play and work in the lives of Asian American adolescents. In this regard, Fickle’s astute reading of play as a set of sites of racialized labor formation enables us to rethink it not in opposition to but actually as constitutive of work.

Youngsuk Chae’s “Postmodern Ecology” approaches environmental critique by walking us through Ruth Ozeki’s famed novel All Over Creation, detailing within it the logic of a global economic crisis that is produced mainly from biotechnology’s production of what is referred to as “simulated nature.” Certainly, Chae cues us to the emergence of space/environmental justice movements in Asian American communities and, in particular, in Asian American literature. These are ominous, yet hopeful, signs that our livable spaces need urgent intentional attention.

If literature can be used as a space of contemporary critique, we know that it can be utilized as well to peer into historical space-time representation. Caroline Yang’s literary analysis is one example. In her essay Yang takes us into Sui Sin Far’s early fiction works, particularly those that depicted the lives of Chinese women slaves and Black female characters, to indicate the enduring influences and “afterlives” of slavery that perpetuated antiblack racisms in U.S. literature. There is a revelation here, in this new reading of Sui Sin Far’s work, of literary space as “a critical site of struggle over the meaning of slavery in empire,” according to Yang, that will make us rethink a more celebratory rendition of that space. I’m sure this provocation will be productive for us.

Our final essay, Joseph Jeon’s “Breakfast at Kuniyoshi’s,” calculates photography as a “space” of erasure, double-edgedly a site that produces and may well be productive of historical amnesia, in reference to Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the paintings of Yasuo Kuniyoshi. In this sense Jeon’s piece is a historical reading, indeed a historical representation, of racial formation during the moment of Japanese postwar economic reconstruction and the galvanization of U.S. imperial power in Asia and the Pacific. To me it is a fitting bookend for our journal issue that limns space from multiple...