'Re-viewing Asian American Literary Studies' by King-Kok Cheung.


Asian American literature - works by people of Asian descent who were either born in or who have migrated to North America - has gone dramatic changes since it emerged as a distinctive field in the wake of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s.
1) The most visible difference arises from its rapid and extensive growth over the past three decades. Today - representing and selecting among writers of diverse national origins. As this literature - along with the theory and criticism accompanying it - expands, original parameters are modified and contested; paralleling the explosion in volume is a profileration of perspectives.
2) Earlies - identity politics with its stress on cultural nationalism and American nativity governed earlier theoretical and ciritical formulations. Now - the stress is on heterogeneity and disapora. The shift has been from seeking to 'claim America' to forging a connection between sia and Asian America; from centering on race and masculinity to revolving around the multiple aces of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality; from being concerned primarily with social history and communal responsibility to being caught in the quandaries and possibilities of postmodernism and multiculturalism.


Identity, cultural nationalism, heterogeneity:
w 'Asian American' was coined in the late 60s to promote political solidarity and cultural nationalism. This movement was a broad-based one, appealing to immigrant and American-born Asians alike. By contrast, early Asian American cultural criticism placed a much greater emphasis on American nativity. Asian American 'sensibility' - one 'that was neither Asian nor white American. Mostly included writers of Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese descent.
w More recently - challenges to the idea of a unifying Asian American sensibility and underlining the need to take into account 'heterogeneity,' 'exile,' and 'diaspora.
w Asian American literature has now broadened to include writings by Americans of Bangladeshi, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Indonesian, Laotian, Nepali, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Thai, and Vietnamese descent.
w Without the initial naing, subsequent institutionalizing, and continuous conestation over this litearure, the many voices that are now being heard might have remained unheard. Perhaps the most important reason to maintain the designation of 'Asian American' literature is not the presence of any cultural, thematic, or poetic unity but the continuing need to amplify marginalized voices, however dissimilar.

American, Asian, Asian American:
w 'Asian American' accentuates the American status of immigrants from Asia and their descendants. The terms grows out of the frustration felt by many American-born citizens of Asian extraction at being treated as perpetual foreigners in the US despite the fact that their roots in this county go back as many as seven generations.
w Such racist treatment, along with Orientalism tendencies that fetishize Asian objects, customs, and persons, has also engendered in many Asian Americans an internal ambivalence about their Asian heritage. Because of the dominant perception that what constitutes 'American' is white, mainstream, and Western, the desire to reclaim a distinctive ethnic tradition seems forever at odds with the desire to be recognized as fully 'Americans.
w Writing by Asian Americans has coalesced around the theme of 'claiming an American, as opposed to Asian, identity'. The obsessive desire to claim American has induced a certain cultural amnesia regarding the country of ancestral origin. Many people of Asian descent feel, to this day, the need to prove their Americanness by shedding their originary culture and by setting themselves apart from new Asian immigrants. Thought different sensibilities admittedly characterize the American-born and the foreign-born, insistence on American nativity can result in the double exclusion of current Asian immigrants - by non-Asians and by American-born Asian alike.

Race and gender:
w Race and gender have been interwines from the beginning in Asian American history and literature. On of the most damaging stereotypes about Asian Americans considered to be the 'emasculation' of Asian men. Outraged by Hollywood's representation of Asian Americans as either sinister or subservient, they resolved to invent a form of ethnopoetics that is specifically masculine. The editors of Aiiieeeee! - a preoccupation with reasserting Asian American manhood, their classification of desirable attributes as masculine.
w Maxine Hong Kingston's The Warrior Woman (1976) - 'the literary decade which had begun on a note of brash machismo with the liberating outcry from the editors of Aiieeeee! . . . Ended on a deeply plangent note of powerful feminism independence and literary vision' (Garrett Hongo 1993).
w The reality of sexism in both Asian and American cultures and the imperative for Asian American women to engaage in gender politics. The hyperfeminization of Asian women in popular American culture is no less demeaning than the emasculation of Asian American men and is in as much need of refutiation.
w The Big Aiieeeee! - discovering a style for Asian American manhood: presenting Chinese and Japanese heroic epics as the sources of the 'Asian heroic tradition' and maintains that 'authentic' Asian American writing must hark back to these heroic tales and to early immigrant annals.
w The relationship between feminism and cultural nationalism is more complex. Many Asian American feminist critics champion cultural nationalism in their own way by contending not only against Asian and white patriarchy but also against Eurocentric feminism.
w Feminism has gone through mucn internal revamping to take into consideration differences in race, class, and culture; both patriarchal and Eurocentric constructions of femininity and masculinity are currently being questioned in cultural studies and gender studies. Similarly, nationalism (increasingly exposed as being complicit with patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality) is being revaluated in ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies. These ongoing investigation may enable scholard and critics of Asian American literature to go beyond the binarism of feminist and msaculinist agendas, to extend feminist concern to men of color who had been subordinated by the dominant culture, and to dispel stereotypes by inventing alternativre models that do not simply conform to patriarchal templates.