Asian Americans and the Modern Imaginary

Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. By David Palumbo-Liu. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. 504 pages. $65.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper).

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU'S ASIAN/AMERICAN IS AN AUDACIOUSLY WIDE-RANGING STUDY examining how modern America's formation has depended upon articulations of Asian American identities. The disciplines of sociology, history, medicine, and economics are just a few of the fields that have grappled with the Asian presence in the U.S.; Palumbo-Liu also examines literary and other interventions by Asian Americans. Like the recent work of Lisa Lowe, Arif Dirlik, and Rob Wilson, Palumbo-Liu is concerned with the uses to which Asian American bodies are put by late capitalism; like Aihwa Ong, he is interested in the shifting formations of subjectivity that have evolved as national identities are increasingly confronted with transnational economies. ¹ Palumbo-Liu handles all of the texts with aplomb, but he is at his most incisive when analyzing literary works. Literary scholars will be particularly interested in his discussion of seldom-analyzed works such as H.T. Tsiang's And China Has Hands (1937), Daniel Okimoto's American in Disguise (1971), Nièh Hùalíng's Mulberry and Peach (1976), Stephen C. Lo's The Incorporation of Eric Chung (1989), and Yoshimi Ishikawa's Strawberry Road (1991). ² These texts are marshaled in support of an authoritative thesis, and Palumbo-Liu's rigor marks this text as an exemplary work of interdisciplinary scholarship. However, while judiciously chosen excerpts would be quite effective in the classroom, I would hesitate to assign the entire text; if the book's sheer mass doesn't intimidate undergraduates, Palumbo-Liu's excursions into high theory will, and in places the reader is forced to leap across historical periods and root around for the connections retrospectively. That said, the book succeeds on the strength of its lucid, imaginative close readings; Palumbo-Liu brings out subtexts with admirable clarity.

The formulation "Asian/American" designates moments when Asia's and America's mutual implication emerges in discourse as a distinction between Asia and America (1). "Asian/American" discourse positions Asians in the U.S. as perpetual foreigners while simultaneously positing them as exemplary modern subjects, a contradictory formulation articulated by the model minority thesis, which labels Asian Americans as the minority who best exemplify the ideals of whiteness. Thus the Asian/American formulation describes a discourse wherein Asian Americans are deployed to define America's multi-racial society, models both for people of color and for whites. (Palumbo-Liu thus joins Dana Takagi in situating Asian Americans at the center of U.S. racial discourse; "Asian/American" reveals the construction of whiteness. ³ ) Palumbo-Liu situates this formulation as a crucial component of America's entry into modernity, in which the project of manifest destiny continues past the western coast of North America to the Pacific; as the U.S. journeys into the Pacific Rim and away from the old world, Asia becomes the site of modernity (2).

Throughout the text, Palumbo-Liu examines the conceptual interplay of the Psyche, the Body, and Space. The Asian "Psyche" had to be evaluated for its affinities to (and distinctiveness from) the American psyche, as when Confucianism is proffered to explain Asian success in the transnational economy. ⁴ The "Body" is simultaneously "semiotically deployed in social and cultural discourse" and a "somatic entity that exists within the contingencies of time and space, desire, need, gratification and denial" (6). Palumbo-Liu proposes to examine the dialectic between discursive constructions of Asian American bodies and the material possibilities available to Asian Americans in a given historical moment: the most audacious example offered is the contention that surgical alteration of eyelids achieved its zenith when the U.S. occupation forces deployed plastic surgery--the rehabilitation of Korean bodies--as part of their campaign to rebuild the Korean state. "Space," like "Body," refers both to the physical environment and to discursive representations...