Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech

Notes

1. Introduction 1. Here, I rely on the term “national belonging” rather than nationality to draw attention to the fact that an individual may identify with a particular nationality (e.g., Asian Americans are, of course, Americans), yet he or she may not feel a sense of belonging. The social and political climate of the United States creates a problematic context for Asian Americans, for whom nationality and national belonging are not necessarily always the same thing. 2. My discussion of The Woman Warrior is not comprehensive and does not include a comprehensive review of the literature. In fact, because of the great number of critical essays and texts about The Woman Warrior—nearly two hundred published sources and several dozens of unpublished dissertations and theses— such a project is beyond the scope of this research. Rather, I offer this discussion as a kind of “microanalysis,” demonstrating my methods and some of the themes to be addressed in subsequent chapters. Also, because Kingston’s text is perhaps one of the best known and most frequently studied texts in Asian American literature, occupying a central space within the emerging “canon” of Asian American texts, it offers a unique vantage point from which to explore the issue of silence, an issue that I argue has relevance for most writings by Asian Pacific American women. For a discussion of the politics surrounding canonization and Asian American literature, see Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature ,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 9 (1996): 315–346. 3. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 4. Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Keynote Lecture, Women of Color Across the Women’s Studies Curriculum Conference, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, March 15, 1996. Notably, however, the term “women of color” implies a binary framework for race only because it is so often conflated with African American women rather than used to mean all women of color (including Latina, Chicana , Native American, Pacific Islander, Asian American, and Arab American women). 5. For discussion of the problematic appropriation of Canadian texts such as Obasan by Asian American critics, see Meng Yu Marie Lo, “Fields of Recognition: Reading Asian Canadian Literature in Asian America.” Ph.D. diss., Department of Rhetoric, University of California–Berkeley, 2001. 6. For example, Lisa Lowe points out the distinction between early Chinese immigrants to the United States in the 1850s, who were primarily poor laborers from the Canton province, with men outnumbering women by ten to one, and more recent Chinese immigrants who come to the United States from Taiwan , Hong Kong, the People’s Republic, or from other parts of the Chinese diaspora , including Malaysia and Singapore. Recent Chinese immigrants are heterogeneous in class backgrounds and education and labor skills as well. See Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) 66. 7. For more on this, see Naheed Islam, “In the Belly of the Multicultural Beast I Am Named South Asian,” Our Feet Walk the Sky, ed. the Women of South Asian Descent Collective (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1993). She suggests that current usages of “South Asian” have become interchangeable with “Indian,” particularly within academic and literary circles, where “South Asian” has recently gained currency, rendering many other groups of people invisible both within these circles and more generally. 8. See, for example, Elena Tajima Creef’s “Notes from a Fragmented Daughter ,” in Anzaldúa, 1990: 82–84; Susan Ito, “Hambun-Hambun,” in E. Kim, 1997: 128–132; and Juliana Pegues/Pei Lu Fung, “White Rice: Searching for Identity,” in Lim-Hing, 1994: 25–36. 9. For discussion of the ways in which such themes are articulated and contested within recent Asian American literary criticism, see Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 10. Here, following Tejaswini Niranjana’s careful rearticulation of “trope,” I hope to indicate, as she does, a “metaphorizing that includes a displacement as well as a re-figuring” (5). 11. See, for example, Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage, 1970); Toni Cade 228 n o t e s t o pa g e s 3 – 7 Bambara, ed., The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: Mentor, 1970); Amy Tachiki et al., eds., Roots: An Asian American Reader (UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1971); Stokely Carmichael and...