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3 _ Interventing Innocence: Race, “Resistance,’’ and the Asian North American Avant-Garde IYKO DAY it marks what I can only call ‘the end of innocence’ —Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities’’1 F OR SOME TIME it has been a critical commonplace to appeal to the various tropes of resistance in cultural texts. In a 1988 essay Meaghan Morris characterizes the discourse of resistance as the “banality’’ of cultural studies, calling into question the disarticulation of consumption from relations of production through the idealization of an all-knowing but nevertheless consuming subject of abjection.2 John Guillory refers to this discourse as a form of “voluntarism’’ that encourages “a descent from the rigor of analysis to the rhetoric of praise or blame and thus links voluntaristic discourse to an even less credible moralism.’’3 Not only in cultural studies, the discourse of resistance is the legitimating principle for the justification of many forms of academic study across the humanities. In every pocket of culture, from South Asian hip hop to Filipina debuts, cultural insurrections are brought to light to reveal paths to political redemption. The result for Morris, remarking rather cynically, is that “I get the feeling that somewhere in some English publisher’s vault there is a master-disk from which thousands of the same article about pleasure, resistance, and the politics of consumption are being run off under different names with minor variations.’’4 Asian American criticism has seen its fair share of both resistance and accommodation. In his recent book Viet Nguyen examines the way Asian American criticism falls into a binarized activity of locating either the resistance of “bad subjects’’ or the accommodation of “model minority’’ subjects. Poem from Waitng for Saskatchewan (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Turnstone Press,1985). Used by permission of Fred Wah. 36 \ A S I A N A M E R I C A N C R I T I C A L D I S C O U R S E I N A C A D E M I A One of hisprincipalcritiquesis directedat thewayAsianAmericanresistance to capitalist exploitation develops from a negotiation with and accumulation of symbolic capital surrounding Asian American racial identity. While an Asian American strategic essentialism and valorization of the “bad subject’’ is necessary for political mobilization in the short term, he concludes, “In the long term, however, the inaccuracy that is inherent in the discourse of the bad subject prevents Asian American intellectuals from recognizing the ability of late capitalism to transform Asian American racial identity into a commodity and Asian America into a niche market for that commodity.’’5 This essay takes up this problem of resistance, whose sedimentation in academia has the potential to fetishize a delimited form of racial identity, by examining its discursive function in a broadened “Asian North American’’ literary field that encompasses both Asian Canadian and Asian American texts, especially as it applies to the development of an Asian North American avant-garde. The main questions I ask are as follows: what are the consequences of an overdetermined discourse of resistance in the expanded field of Asian North American literary studies?6 Which texts stand in as what Nguyen calls the resistant “bad subject’’ or the accommodating “model minority’’? Further, how does the integration of Asian American and Asian Canadian texts under the “Asian North American’’ umbrella term affect the development of an avant-garde political project? In order to answer these questions I plan to examine how a discourse of resistance constrains the visibility of certain Asian Canadian avant-garde writers. To be clear, the purpose of this essay is not to reject the act of resistance itself; rather, it is to propose that oppositionality has been discursively constituted in Asian America on different terms than in Canada, thereby limiting the visibility of Asian Canadian cultural projects. In particular, for writers of colour in Canada, the history of legislated multiculturalism has generated cultural responses that differ from those that emerged out of civil rights activism and Asian American cultural nationalism in the US. In order to illustrate this erasure of Asian Canadian forms of opposition, I focus on the disappearance of renown Asian Canadian writer Fred Wah from an expanded Asian North American context. Considering the many books of poetry, critical essays, and prose-poetic “bio-text’’ that comprise Wah’s oeuvre, not to mention the Tish poetry newsletter he cofounded in Canada in the 1960s and the prestigious Governor General’s award he won in 1991, I find mysterious the virtual...

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