Description
Book SynopsisThis book introduces Asian American literary studies by engaging the conditions, contingencies, and immediate and long-term effects of its major debates. Two rationales inform Ling's presentation of the field in this way: first is a felt need to provide recognizable contours and trajectories for the evolution of Asian American criticism as an ethnic-specific minoritarian formation in the United States; second is an imperative to historicize its practices - including polemics, controversies, and ideological ruptures - as an ongoing negotiation undertaken by Asian American critics for a more self-conscious and more adequate representation of the field's interests. These rationales are fully contextualized in the book's Introduction and Conclusion. The main body of this study is organized non-chronologically into 8 chapters, with each designed to reflect how the field has been energized by its demographic transformation, its growing intellectual heterogeneity, its defining moments, and it
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Unfinalizing the
Aiiieeeee! Moment: A Historicist View of the Field
Chapter One Race, Gender, and Class: Overlapping Formations
--Centering Gender --Exploration of Sexuality --Essentialism and Difference --Race and Class Revisited Chapter Two The Necessity and Fiction of “Asian America”
--Cultural Nationalism --Beyond Pan-Asian Ethnicity --Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies --Rethinking Asian American Specificity Chapter Three Intercultural and Generational Concerns
--Writing Immigrants --Cultural Translation --
Model Minority and the Paradox of Assimilation --Breaking the Tradition Chapter Four The Transnational Turn
--Planetary Presence --The Asia-Pacific Investment --Cautions and Dissonances --Locating the Historical Referent Chapter Five The Social Function of Literature
--Cognitive Uses of Language --Community-Based Self-Representation --Controversies --Debating Resistance Chapter Six Aesthetic Form --
Form after New Criticism --
Legacies and Practices --Reinventing Realist Genres --Poetic and Theatrical Studies Chapter Seven Protocols and the Politics of Institutionalization
--Reading Formations --Periodization --Methodological Challenge --Post-identity Subjects Chapter Eight Emerging Interests
--Food Studies --Militarization, Critical Refugee Studies, and Ecocriticism --Speculative Literature --Digital Humanities and New Media Conclusion Anti-essentialist Critique and the Asian American Literary Profession
Notes Bibliography Index
