Reading in the Aftermath: An Asian American Jane Eyre

What business do we have to speak of Brontë novels in relation to ourselves? For scholars of color, how do we engage with canon without reifying our own marginality within the rubric of Victorian empire and exclusion? This essay performs what I call "reading in the aftermath," akin to Christina Sharpe's reading "in the wake": a willingness to confront a racist past and its distorting aftereffects on life today. Turning to contemporary afterlives of Victorian texts, this article applies Asian and Asian Americanist critique, such as Anne Cheng's Ornamentalism, to explore a recent Brontë adaptation, Patricia Park's Re Jane. In her novel, Park uses the language of Jane Eyre as a tool to critique the classic's own critical legacy, ridiculing the pedantry of Anglo-American feminism imposed upon younger women of color. Multicultural afterlives and adaptations, I suggest, present opportunities to conjoin past and present, drawing Brontë studies into current discussions on race, racism, and ethnic American literatures.