Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (review)

Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent. By David Leiwei Li. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. xii + 261 pp. $45.00 hbk.

Recent studies of Asian American literature have enabled the rethinking of convergences between contradictory social-historical and cultural forces that constitute the nation as lived reality and idea. David Leiwei Li's Imagining the Nation: Asian American and Cultural Consent joins such works as Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Duke, 1996) and Jinqi Ling's Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (Oxford, 1998) with its focus on the tensions illuminated and interrogated by Asian American cultural practices between an abstract concept of equality, formally promised by the rights/rites of citizenship, and material inequities by race, wealth, gender and sexuality. As these and other texts would suggest, however, a shared perception of the paradoxes of U.S. nationhood and nationalism has given rise to a diverse range of approaches to newer and older problems of (aesthetic, political) representation. Contested homologies and disjunctions between nation and narration, between different orders of symbolic and social inscription and struggle, and between national, transnational, subjective, and literary-canonical formations and predicaments have emerged as defining features of current Asian American cultural scholarship.

Li's study makes a provocative contribution to the continuing redefinition of these interpretive categories, perhaps as much for what it promises yet may fail to deliver as for what it substantially argues. A self-described "work of materialist cultural criticism" (17), Imagining the Nation examines "how the sense of the nation and its social relationships are constructed and deconstructed through reading and writing in competing institutional sites" (16). A sense of these competing institutional sites is effectively conveyed by Li's reconsiderations of several exemplary debates, including highly publicized exchanges between Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston and controversies surrounding David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly. Attending to works selected from what Li identifies as the period of "Asian abjection" (1943/1965-present), the study is organized according to three major historical subdivisions: an "ethnic nationalist/cultural separatist phase" (late 1960s, early 1970s), a "feminist/academic phase" (late 1970s, early 1980s) and "the current heteroglosssiast phase, in which voices of difference and diaspora, identity and collectivity coexist within an indisputable professional dominance of what was once a cultural ghetto" (16). Each of these phases is detailed in the course of Li's analysis according to its historically distinctive articulations of the stakes of Asian American cultural production and criticism, and the kinds of conflicts and rapprochements that have emerged within and between established and emergent communities of writers and readers. Imagining the Nation's affinity for discordant opinions and perspectives--exemplified as well by the author's own style of argument--numbers among the work's strengths, underscoring the heterogeneity and diversity of the practices and moments under investigation, and also serving to chart the vexed terrain within which "cultural consent" can be said to emerge as a crucial problem. Yet questions can be raised concerning the study's methodological framework, and the extent to which "cultural consent" as a topic of textual and socio-historical analysis might be obscured by the author's own, at times explicit, at times opaque, polemical investments. Readers familiar with Lisa Lowe's aforementioned study may be surprised by its very brief characterization, early in Li's analysis, as a form of advocacy criticism: as an argument for the "autonomy" of Asian American cultural resistance and the Asian American subject's "supersession" of dominant national narratives (15). A tendency to reduce a wide range of representational and critical strategies into a smaller array of fixed "positions" is discernible here and throughout the book, and in the binary language of endorsement and rejection that dominates Li's readings of literature and theory--and may undermine some of the book's most powerful and insightful articulations.

For instance, Imagining the Nation offers...