Imagining the Nation

by Li, David Leiwei

• ISBN13: 9780804734004
• ISBN10: 0804734003
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-11-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Since the 1970's, when Maxine Hong Kingston began publishing her prize-winning books, we have seen an explosive growth in Asian American literature, a literature that has won both popular and critical acclaim. Literary anthologies and critical studies attest to a growing academic interest in the field. This book seeks to identify the forces behind this literary emergence and to explore both the unique place of Asian Americans in American culture and what that place says about the way Americanness is defined. The author is preoccupied with how the sense of the nation is disseminated through the practice of reading and writing, and he argues that Asian American literature is a productive discursive negotiation of the contemporary contradiction in American citizenship. By analyzing the textual strategies with which literary Asian America is represented, the book shows how the "fictive ethnicity" of the nation continues to exert its regulatory power and suggests how we can work toward a radical American democratic consent. Through nuanced readings of exemplary texts, the author delineates how Asian American literary production has become a site for the creation of Asian American subjects and community. The texts range from Kingston's enigmatic Tripmaster Monkey to the seductive cunning of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club; from Bharati Mukherjee's romantic Jasmine to the geocultural ambivalence of David Mura's Turning Japanese; and from the transvestic subversion of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly to the transpirational tropes of David Wong Louie's Pangs of Love. Imagining the Nation integrates a fine appreciation of the formal features of Asian American literature with the conflict and convergence among different reading communities and the dilemma of ethnic intellectuals caught in the process of their institutionalization. By articulating Asian American structures of feeling across the nexus of East and West, black and white, nation and diaspora, the book both sets out a new terrain for Asian American literary culture and significantly strengthens the multiculturalist challenge to the American canon.

Author Biography

David Leiwei Li is Collins Professor of the Humanities at the University of Oregon.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Alienation, Abjection, and Asian American Citizenship	1	(21)
PART I EMERGENCE
Aiiieeeee! and the Predicament of Asian American Articulation	21	(23)
Can Maxine Hong Kingston Speak? The Contingency of The Woman Warrior	44	(21)
PART II CLAIMING AMERICA
Canon, Collaboration, and the Corporeality of Culture	65	(26)
American Romances, Immigrant Incarnations	91	(20)
PART III WHITHER ASIA
Genes, Generation, and Geospiritual (Be)longings	111	(15)
Eccentric Homes: Topography, Pedagogy, and Memory	126	(27)
PART IV REPRESENTATION RECONSIDERED
The Look, the Act, the Transvestic, and the Transpirational Asian	153	(21)
Ethnic Agency and the Challenge of Representation	174	(11)
Conclusion: Asian American Identity in Difference and Diaspora	185	(22)
Notes	207	(28)
Works Cited	235	(18)
Index	253