Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
the telling unlocks fictional worlds that radically widen the social contexts of Asian American cultural productions.
It would be premature, however, to suggest that Asian Americanist and ethnic literary critique, as they have traditionally been defined, is no longer needed.5 We understand that the writer’s racial identity still matters and can be used to categorize a literary body. Nevertheless, if a strategic essentialist approach persists as one of the primary modes for defining Asian American literature, what then of thinking about the strategic antiessentialism of fictional worlds? I borrow here from George Lipsitz’s conception of strategic antiessentialism as a kind of disguise “on the basis of its ability to highlight, underscore, and augment an aspect of one’s identity that one cannot express directly” (Dangerous Crossroads 62).6 Given the potential propensity to assume that Asian American writers depict only narrative perspectives that overlap with their ethnoracial backgrounds, the aspect of “identity” that cannot be expressed directly is that of the writerly imagination, which cannot be tethered to a single ancestry or origin point. My deployment of strategic antiessentialism thus shifts Asian American cultural criticism outside of its more traditional topics and themes. In this way, strategic antiessentialism offers a paradigm that moves beyond the limits of cultural nationalist models and forefronts a deconstructive critical methodology in which the Asian American writer and his or her nonautobiographical narrator stand at the center.
Narrative Perspective and the Constitution of Asian American Literature
One element we need to consider further is the relationship between authorial descent and narrative content, as this link conditions the emergence of specific literary forms. Indeed, twentieth-century narrative texts by American writers of Asian descent generally fall into two aesthetic and formal categories: autobiography/memoir or the ethnoracial bildungsroman (or some variation that melds those two literary genres). The dominance of these two forms is clearly connected to the expansive opportunity both forms provide for telling stories of the Asian American subject, whether in a nonfictional configuration, such as autobiography, or in its fictional valences, as in the ethnoracial bildungsroman. Despite the apparent differences between these two forms, their connection lies in the importance of the narrating subject and corresponding narrative perspective. In the Asian American autobiography and Asian American bildungsroman, narrative cohesion typically results from the maintenance of one narrator or main character, whose life readers follow from the beginning to the end and who can or could be conflated with the author. Given the centuries-long hostile and dehumanizing caricatures of Asians as yellow perils, model minorities, dragon ladies, and kung-fu masters, self-representation is of paramount importance. One might call this developmental narrative, as figured in both autobiography and in the ethnoracial bildungsroman, a “racial form” (Lye, America’s Asia 1), precisely because sociohistorical circumstances exert influence on modes of literary expression. The ability of the minority writer to explore his or her life (or someone’s not too dissimilar) in autobiographical or fictional form has thus consistently provided a valuable means to nuance and diversify what we understand as the American experience.
Asian American literature’s emergence through the development of autobiography and the ethnoracial bildungsroman must also be considered alongside its connections to the literary and commercial publishing markets. Especially in the first half of the twentieth century, ethnic writers played the part of the native informant, providing depictions of the so-called authentic Asian American experience.7 While some authors faced difficulty in reaching a wide audience, commercial interest in the ethnic experience helps explain the appeal of writers such as Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto, Younghill Kang, Jade Snow Wong, C. Y. Lee, and Lin Yutang in the period prior to Maxine Hong Kingston’s monumental work, The Woman Warrior. Indeed, as guides to the American minority experience, these writers negotiated a complicated milieu where literary value was often tied to authenticity. Interest in Asian cultures and oriental objects had been circulating in the United States from as far back as the late seventeenth century, helping create a reading audience receptive to the increased popularization of such writers in the early twentieth.8
This authenticity paradigm circumscribes Asian American writers by assuming unification among the author, narrative perspective, and narrative content. For instance, a Chinese American might be presumed to write from the narrative perspective of a Chinese American character. In addition, the corresponding representational terrain is then expected to primarily elucidate Chinese American social contexts. Narrative perspective is therefore often under incredible pressure to exhibit ethnoracial authenticity. An alignment among the writer’s ethnoracial descent, narrative perspective, and content is not in and of itself impoverishing and restrictive, but I am most interested in exploring how and to what ends Asian American writers travel outside and can be read outside of this model.9
While American writers of Asian descent have not always remained confined within fictional worlds that mirror their ethnic and racial backgrounds, deviations prior to 1989 are few and far between.10 The most well-known writers to flout a more autoethnographically inflected practice are Winnifred Eaton, of Chinese British heritage, who took on an ethnic pseudonym to pen her many Japanese-themed novels, and Diana Chang, author of six novels, many of which do not contain major characters of Asian descent.11 Eaton and Chang both provide interesting but historically isolated cases for contextualizing the commercial and critical response to ethnoracial narratives at different historical points in the twentieth century. Eaton composed her fictions roughly between 1899 and 1925, while Chang composed hers between 1956 and 1978. Hence, it is difficult to read Eaton and Chang as part of a sustained movement constituting an expansive, nonautoethnographic fictional literary tradition.12 At the same time, the emergence of such fictions spotlights the complicated relationship between Asian American writers and textual content, especially as themes of racial oppression, migration, and assimilation do not always ground their cultural productions.
While the commercial pressures that reduce Asian American writers to native informants have been in place for at least a century, the contemporary period is exceptional. The commodification of Asian American writers unquestionably continues. The incredible success of Amy Tan in the late 1980s, for instance, inaugurated another sustained wave of literary marketplace racialization, in which the publishing industry codified the Asian American writer as a native informant. But for a number of reasons, the current moment differs from when Eaton and Chang were first published, precisely because of processes related to institutionalization. Asian American studies programs and departments are now found across the United States. In addition, the Immigration Act of 1965 enabled Asian immigrants to enter the United States in considerable numbers for the first time since 1924. This influx set the stage for a new and larger generation of writers. It is no coincidence that nonautoethnographic fictions began to appear en masse in the 1990s, roughly a generation after the Immigration Act. During this latter period, Asian Americans have also been understood as model minorities, a shift in racial formation that must be taken into account to consider the changes occurring in fictional worlds.
Thus, three general historical and sociocultural circumstances frame this project: the emergence of postracial discourse in the model minority era, issues of literary commodification, and the development of critical trends in relation to Asian American writers.
Asian American Fiction in the Postrace Era
The archive of Asian Americans fictions explored in this study, all which were published after 2000, collectively appear in a period in which conversations concerning social inequality have dramatically shifted, especially in relation to the issue of racial oppression.13 According to Linda Trinh Võ, the “postracial narrative” involves the assumption that the United States has moved “beyond its racist past”; she argues further that this viewpoint “reaffirms the palatable and celebratory multiculturalism, which is devoid of historical context and ignores the complex ways in which racism is embedded in our society. It reflects, in some respects, the way a color-blind society would supposedly operate, by flattening out racial difference” (332). Subsumed within the postracial narrative, Asian Americans appear in a complicated position precisely because they are held up as model minorities, a group that has transcended social inequalities. The model minority myth suggests a narrative of development. Indeed, it upholds the racial minority as