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Reviewed by:
  • Global Perspectives on Asian American Literature
  • Yuan Shu (bio)
Global Perspectives on Asian American Literature, edited by Guiyou Huang and Wu Bing. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2008. Iv + 327 pp. RMB 32.90 paper. ISBN 978-7-5600-7.

Since the question of globalizing literary studies was first raised and debated by literary theorists and historians in a special issue of PMLA in 2001, the notion of globalization itself has undergone significant changes. From its initial designations of the expansion of neoliberal capitalism, the exercise of Western political and military hegemony around the globe, innovations in communications technologies, and the proliferation of U.S. popular culture on a global scale, globalization has increasingly been associated with the emergence of the Global South and the empowering of East Asian economic entities. Such changes are not only documented in cultural production but also contested and negotiated in new critical discourses that would compete for global attention. On these shifting terrains, what do we mean by “global perspectives”? Why would “global perspectives” matter to Asian American literature?

It is in this changing context that I situate Global Perspectives on Asian American Literature. Rather than reading Asian American literature in relation to what critic Paul Jay calls “a global network of forces” that are aesthetic, social, cultural, economic, and political, the contributors in the collection employ the term “global” in different ways and explore its meanings from different perspectives (43). In their introductory essay, the two editors articulate “the global” more or less in terms of the gap between East and West, and understand cultural exchange as a possible solution to global confrontation. Following this pattern of thought, several contributors from mainland China discuss Chinese American literature as a contact zone between the Chinese and Western worlds, and consider its significance in relation to the validity of Chinese cultural values in the U.S. context and the pertinence of its mode of representation. The essays in the second group are defined by the efforts of their authors to engage the current discourses on globalization and intervene in the political, economic, and cultural processes of globalization from postcolonial and ethnic studies perspectives. Most scholars in the collection, however, approach Asian American literature formalistically and culturally from their specific geopolitical locations, which vary from Switzerland to Japan, from the United States to China.

As a coeditor, Wu Bing, in her essay, “Reading Chinese American Literature as ‘Introspective Literature,’” situates Chinese American literature in a process of reevaluating Chinese culture and explores the literary articulations as crucial to the regeneration of China (36). Such positioning of Chinese American literature [End Page 366] in relation to the emergence of China reflects the complexity of the Chinese nation-state on the global stage at the present moment. On the one hand, China has achieved unprecedented economic development; on the other hand, the nation-state has not been prepared to represent itself globally or to negotiate with Western powers globally. In other words, China is more interested in participating in neoliberal capitalism and regenerating its economic and cultural power than in challenging the U.S.-centered global order with any alternative. Precisely for this reason, when Wu returns to Confucian values, she repackages them as a new grand narrative in which “peace will prevail throughout the universe” if the individual, the family, and the nation-state fulfill their responsibilities (39). Of course, such rhetoric on peace and responsibility is relevant insofar as the U.S. empire has turned the age of globalization into an age of endless war and its persistent financial crises have significantly impacted global economic and political stability.

Similarly, Zhao Wenshu raises the rhetorical question, “why is there Orientalism in Chinese American literature?” and critiques the U.S. publication establishment and readership formation as complicit in perpetuating Orientalism. In a self-reflexive mode, Zhao moves beyond the issue of cultural reception and examines why and how Chinese self-perception has been affected by Western discourses since the late nineteenth century (253).

Engaging recent discourses on globalization, several authors seek to intervene in Western imperialist expansion and production of spaces. In “The Global in Recent Asian North American Narratives,” Eleanor Ty reconfigures the...

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