Racial Asymmetries. Stephen Hong Sohn
did not take up such literatures as the grounds for full-length book studies until Elaine H. Kim’s Asian American Literature in 1982. Kim was already grappling with the complexities of what constituted Asian American literature in her introduction by adding Korean Americans as an ethnic group to the taxonomy. As critics such as Kim, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Amy Ling wrestled with defining boundaries, the field underwent a significant metamorphosis, moving from the identity-politics model popularized under cultural nationalism to an analytical methodology influenced by fluidity, decenteredness, and poststructural and postmodern theories.26 Sunn Shelley Wong elucidates some of the changes to critical genealogies in her reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s mixed-genre text Dictee (1982).27 According to Wong, the cultural nationalist leanings of the field in its earliest period would have been incompatible with an interpretive apparatus equipped to consider the multifocal nature of Cha’s mixed-genre work (63). The “politics of difference” (63) certainly has propelled the scholarly field forward, especially in the way that it allows a host of different types of Asian American literary studies to negotiate the intersectional, fragmented, and comparative nature of racial identity. The entire field constellates around this foundational methodology: scholars make apparent what Lisa Lowe, building off Kim’s foundational book, calls the “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” (66) of Asian American lives, whether related to issues of gender, sexuality, class, diasporic trajectory, age, disability, generational dynamics, or psychic structures, among other such markers of difference and social rubrics.
The field is thus characterized by its commitment to examining Asian American racial formation from as many different perspectives and approaches as possible, so much so that the term “Asian American” often seems incoherent. Susan Koshy’s “The Fiction of Asian American Literature” clarifies these incongruities: “‘Asian American’ offers us a rubric that we cannot not use. But our usage of the term should rehearse the catachrestic status of the formation. I use the term ‘catachresis’ to indicate that there is no literal referent for the rubric ‘Asian American’ and, as such, the name is marked by the limits of its signifying power” (342). The “limits” of the “signifying power” can be seen in the litany of monographs that illuminate the inconsistencies that define Asian American literature, including but not limited to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Race and Resistance (2002), Kandice Chuh’s Imagine Otherwise (2003), Tina Chen’s Double Agency (2005), and Christopher Lee’s The Semblance of Identity (2012).
Even with these many critical interventions, the field faces an incredible challenge with respect to theorizing what constitutes the Asian American fictional world. As the earlier example of Whiteman suggests, must the Asian American fictional world contain Asian American characters? Must it possess a narrator of Asian descent or a narrative perspective that primarily follows an Asian American character?28 Fortunately, a large number of recent book-length publications devoted to the study of Asian American literature, genre, aesthetics, and formal impulses tackle such conundrums.29 This book adds something new in its concentration on first-person fictional narratives in which the narrator’s and writer’s ethnoracial descent do not explicitly match.30 By focusing on the storyteller, we can push cultural critique rooted in race and ethnic studies in unpredictable directions and ultimately agitate for more interdisciplinary and syncretic analytical approaches. Rajini Srikanth argues that an autoethnographic reading practice “can insulate and isolate us from the very people among whom we wish to become more visible, from whom we desire greater understanding, and with whom we perhaps seek greater intimacy” (201). Such a call to reconsider South Asian American literatures informs my project, but I address the desire for “another kind of narrative” in relation to Asian American literature at large, considering those texts that take us to the “frontiers of our consciousness” (201). While Srikanth specifically directs her appeal to creative communities, she also pushes critics to challenge their analytical practices and to move out of the zone that requires Asian American cultural studies to be specifically formulated through Asian American subject matter (however that might be defined). The fictions I focus on lead us exactly into the “frontiers” of our consciousnesses as literary studies and ethnic studies scholars by questioning the place of the author in relation to the fictional world. What do these fictions tell us, not only about Asian American identity politics and culture but also about comparative subject positions, whether elucidated through ethnic, racial, or other social differences? Racial Asymmetries shows that the answer is bound up with the Asian American writer’s move to create storytelling perspectives that undermine an autobiographical or autoethnographic reading practice and, by doing so, to craft expansive possibilities for fictional worlds.
In this era of postracial conversations and viewpoints, Asian American cultural criticism stands at a fascinating crossroads. The critical methodologies employed by scholars within the field undoubtedly remain important to analyzing the representations of Asian Americans. At the same time, the deployment of strategic essentialism that constitutes the field through a coalitional framework based on authorial descent and its connection to the representational landscape can, however unintentionally, marginalize fictions that do not focus only or specifically on Asian American experiences or contexts. Even as Asian American cultural criticism gains more visibility at the institutional level, it must remain ever vigilant to the ways that analytical inquiries should embrace the egalitarian ethos that characterized the field when it first emerged and cultivate more expansive interdisciplinary methodologies that can attend to the rich morphologies of fictional worlds.
Giving Voices to Asian American Fictional Worlds
The archive at the center of this book does beg the question of what makes such Asian American fiction fictional. Here, narratology provides a set of tools to advance my critical inquiries, as theorists have looked at narration as a site to consider how fiction operates in contradistinction to other genres more stringently tethered to external referents, such as historical studies and biographies. The narratologist Kalle Pihlainen reminds us that “in historical narratives . . . the viewpoint that we have is consistently that of the extradiegetic narrator—equatable, and indeed equated, with the author, the historian who has access to the material and who is critical toward the material as well as makes it clear to readers when he or she does not know something” (53).31 Pihlainen’s consideration of the writerly subject position has wider ramifications for the truth-telling characteristics of certain narrative forms such as life-writing, memoir, and autoethnography. Per Philippe Lejeune’s definition of the autobiography/memoir (5), the author’s name is synonymous with the narrator-character. Autobiographical and autoethnographic narration have similar valences, where the storyteller, extradiegetic or not, overlaps in some way with the author.32
In contrast, fictional narration does not have the same constraints. Speaking of heterodiegetic narrators, Dorrit Cohn spotlights one element integral to fictionality: the narrator’s unobstructed access to characters’ minds, a process akin to telepathy: “This penetrative optic calls on devices—among others free indirect style—that remain unavailable to narrators who aim for referential (nonfictional) presentation” (Distinction of Fiction 16).33 I extend Cohn’s proposition beyond heterodiegetic narrators (typically third person) precisely because there are homodiegetic narratives (typically first person) that cannot be attached to an external referent (such as an actual person), and such narratives cannot be placed in parallel with the author in the way that an autobiographical text, memoir, autoethnography, or historical study might.34 In other words, the “I” doing the narrating may be of an entirely different ancestral background than the writer, and in these cases, the author must imagine what this other constructed entity sees, thinks, and feels. The majority of narratives critiqued in Racial Asymmetries are told through the first-person mode, as the American writer of Asian descent employs the voice and narrative perspective of a character whose racial and ethnic background do not match his or her own.35 For writers, severing the link between the author and the narrator is part of an “exercise,” per Richard Walsh’s rhetorical theory of fiction, that enhances how the representational terrain can be read as make-believe (“Fictionality and Mimesis” 119). However, when the “tour guide function” collapses the Asian American author with certain narrators and with certain narrative perspectives and then commodifies