Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory ed. by A. Robert Lee (review)

Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory, the first collection of essays on the works of Karen Tei Yamashita, aims to “open new interpretive pathways into her literary achievement” (1), as its editor A. Robert Lee states. In its diverse approaches—theoretical, philosophical, literary, cultural, and historical—and genres—criticism, essays, overviews, and interview—the collection persuasively demonstrates Yamashita’s central role in orienting the direction of Asian American literary and cultural discourse in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

As the essays build on the substantial body of Yamashita scholarship, they highlight how the rise of key theoretical, political, and analytic terms in the field, such as transnational, global, hemispheric, intersectional, cosmopolitan, diasporic, deterritorializing, ecological, environmental, and more, came to prominence in tandem with scholarship of Yamashita’s work. Indeed, as Jinqi Ling claims, whose Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Trans-national Novels (2012) offers the first monograph study of Yamashita, her influence in “the reshaping of the Asian American literary imagination during the past two decades” is unquestionable (qtd. in Lee 3). Furthermore, these essays reveal the fact that interpreting Yamashita’s work requires the deployment of two approaches that are often artificially separated—literary and materialist, form and content, aesthetic and political, imaginative and historical—and thereby powerfully breaches the binary of aesthetics and politics.

The first essay in the collection, by Cyrus R. K. Patell, addresses the central role of Yamashita in theorizing not only ethnic minority literature but also American literature. Tracing the genealogy of categories under which Yamashita’s work has been identified—Japanese American, Asian American, ethnic American, multicultural, and more—Patell suggests “emergent literature” (10) as the most useful analytic category to highlight the “dynamics of cosmopolitanism” (11) of Yamashita’s vision, one that eschews the maintenance of borders and boundaries that can be found in theories of multiculturalism. Patell argues that this cosmopolitan vision is what renders Yamashita’s work as the exemplar of the new “American novel” (9): “The most interesting American novels these days may well be those that turn out to be the most cosmopolitan.”

One set of essays demonstrates Yamashita’s contemporaneity by bringing new theoretical approaches to her work. By densely historicizing the modern politics of Brazil and Japanese migration, John B. Gamber highlights the relationship between romantic environmentalism and transnationalism in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). The “agrarian optimism” (44) that becomes the reigning value and critical agent of the novel, he suggests, must be understood in the philosophical and political context of the environmentalist tradition. Ruth Y. Hsu suggests that the highly structured narrative of Tropic of Orange (1997) can be usefully understood in relation to chaos theory, developed by thinkers such as Foucault, Hayles, Barth, Deleuze and Guattari, and Hardt and Negri, and by postmodern writers such as Calvino, Barth, and Coover. Yamashita’s “restructured postmodernist poetics” (106) not only affects the diegesis of the novel, Hsu argues, but also the thematic import regarding the “prevailing cultural construct of identity” (118). Nathan Ragain takes on the trope of the circle in Circle K Cycles (2001) by examining it as “an economic concept” (125) exemplified by the three Ks of labor performed by the Brazilians of Japanese descent: “Kitanai. Kitsui. Kigen. Work designated as dirty, difficult, dangerous” (Yamashita, Circle K Cycles qtd. in Ragain 124). Ragain’s Marxist approach extends the meaning of the circle beyond the discourse of nationality and consumption, and reveals the “cycle of production and reproduction as the hinge around which national identity is disjunctively articulated” (125).

Another set of essays offer a comparative reading of Yamashita in order to create insights and answer polemical questions. Cynthia F. Wong situates Yamashita alongside two other Japanese American women writers, Joy Kogawa and Julie Otsuka. As these writers explore the topic of dislocation—of immigration, internment, or Picture Brides—through the genre of the Japanese I-novel, they are enacting the...