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Intro -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- 1 Introduction -- 1.1 Precarity and Trauma -- 1.2 Trauma, Precarity, and the Politics/Poetics of Asian Others -- 1.3 Book Organization -- 1.3.1 Japanese-American Relocation Experiences -- 1.4 The Vietnam War and Refugee Writings -- 1.5 Postmemory and Transoceanic Coolitude -- 2 Japanese (Post)-Internment Narratives -- 2.1 Against Historical Amnesia: Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine and Buddha in the Attic -- 2.1.1 American Dream or a Mirage? -- 2.1.2 Stolen Time, Forgotten Memories -- 2.2 Politics of War Memories: Remembering the Japanese Internment in Joseph Craig Danner's The Fires of Edgarville -- 2.2.1 Not One War, But Many Wars -- 2.2.2 Remembering the Unspeakable: Silence, Trauma, and Healing -- 2.2.3 Coda -- 3 The Vietnam War and Refugee Writings -- 3.1 Monique Truong's Bitter in the Mouth: A Gothic and Liminal Narrative of Trauma -- 3.1.1 Mourning and Trauma Writings -- 3.1.2 Liminal Writing, Unspeakable, and Aphasia -- 3.1.3 The Unspeakable Ghostly Other -- 3.1.4 Coda -- 3.2 "All Wars Were Fought Twice": Viet Thanh Nguyen and Refugee Trauma Memories -- 4 Postmemory and Transoceanic Coolitude -- 4.1 Beyond Precarity and Trauma: Janice Lowe Shinebourne's The Last Ship -- 4.1.1 Precarity and Coolitude-Shared Experience -- 4.1.2 Precarity and Trauma as a Politically Induced Condition -- 4.2 Post 911 Trauma in Janice Lowe Shinebourne's Chinese Women -- 4.3 In the Shadow of Modernity: The Search for Chinese Ghosts in Andre Lamontagne's Les fossoyeurs: Dans le memoire de Quebec (Gravediggers) -- 4.3.1 Chinese Diaspora and Vanishing Presence -- 4.3.2 Ghostly Subterranean Connections and Multiracial Imaginary -- 5 Conclusion -- Works Cited -- Index.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction ''It's not right for a body to know his own origins,' -- Chapter 1 ''I should be—American!'' Abjection and the Asian (American) Body -- Chapter 2 ''The dance that's happening'' Performance, Politics, and Asian American Theatre Companies -- Chapter 3 ''We'come a Chinatowng, Folks!'' Resisting Abjection -- Chapter 4 ''I'll be here . . . right where you left me'' Mimetic Abjection/Abject Mimicry -- Chapter 5 ''Whose history is this, anyway?'' Changing Geographies in Ping Chong's East-West Quartet -- Afterword ''Then we'll have drama,'' -- Notes -- References -- Index

To begin here -- The Asian childhood : writing beginnings -- Cultural revolutions and takeovers : war as structure -- The liminal childhood : biraciality as narrative position -- Citizens or denizens : inscribing the tropes of Asian North Americanization -- In North America : formulating experience -- The childhood for children : the cultural experience of the early reader -- Conclusion : rewriting the childhood

Introduction: Repetition and race -- Racial trauma and triangulation in Susan Choi's The foreign student -- Remapping the politics of pastiche in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of orange -- Interrupted intertextuality in Chang-rae Lee's Native speaker -- Practicing the future in Maxine Hong Kingston's The fifth book of peace -- Conclusion: Repetition, form, and history

"Serious Play: Race, Game, Asian American Literature," argues that games are narrative fantasies of perfectly equal opportunity that can help us reconceive of what it means to be a minority in contemporary America. Race's idiomatic evolution into a "race card" points not just to identity's growing immateriality and "virtualization" but to its increasingly intimate relationship with the ludic. Asian American authors in particular have seized upon the possibilities of transforming identity into an object of play, in part because gameplay opens up a space to challenge stereotypes about the group's "Tiger Mother"-esque obsession with work and apparent allergy to "frivolous" endeavors. Rereading Asian American literature through its literal and proverbial games, from the convivial mahjongg club at the center of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club to the game-theoretical model of the "prisoner's dilemma" captured in Japanese American internment novels, "Serious Play" reveals that it is not the Asian American ability to work but to play that offers the most cogent insight into identity formation as a simultaneously personal, political, and ludic pursuit.

Introduction : Writing the ghetto -- "Like a slum": ghettos and ethnic enclaves, ghetto and genre -- The Japanese American internment : master narratives and class critique -- Chinese suicide: political desire and queer exogamy -- Ethnic entrepreneurs: Korean American spies, shopkeepers, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots -- Indian Edison: the ethnoburbian paradox and corrective ethnography -- Conclusion : A fork in the road: the post-racial aesthetic and class visibility

AbstractThe Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Early Asian American LiteraturebyAudrey Wu ClarkDoctor of Philosophy in EnglishUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Colleen Lye, Co-ChairProfessor Richard Cándida Smith, Co-ChairMy project traces a genealogy of universalism in early Asian American literature that led to the panethnic formation of the Asian American literary canon in the 1960s and 1970s. I contribute to the recent criticisms of panethnicity as the organizing principle of the field by arguing that the panethnic paradigm, based solely on the anachronistically imposed alliance of excluded diverse Asian ethnic groups, did not structure early Asian American literature. Instead, I argue that the authors of these early texts represented the racial particularity of their "Asian American" protagonists as universal. The protagonists' performances of universalism exposed the doubleness of American universalism--that is, the failed universalism that excluded racial minorities and the promised inclusive universalism that is yet to come. My conceptualization of Asian American universalism fortifies the theoretical aspect of the sociological paradigm of panethnicity by offering a different and more historically specific approach than the deconstructive readings of political resistance and melancholic abjection that have very recently theorized panethnicity. Since Americanism was conceived through liberal universalism during the period of Asian exclusion (1882-1943), becoming "Asian American" for these authors and their protagonists impossibly and yet productively universalized their racial particularity to their predominantly white audiences. For some critics, Asian American subjectivity is imagined through only the impossibility of Asian American universalism. By contrast, I argue that the Asian American is formed through the dialectic between racial particularity as an "alien ineligible to citizenship" and liberal universalism. The aim of the dialectic in each of the works I study is framed by the historical moment of each work's publication: In my first two chapters on Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Sadakichi Hartmann's and Yone Noguchi's modernist haikus, I demonstrate that their protagonists and poetic personas attempt to claim space within the American literary imagination during the Progressive Era. In the latter two chapters, I examine the ways in which the protagonists of Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Caste and Outcast and Younghill Kang's East Goes West , and Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart employ modernist forms of temporal nonlinearity to transcend the capitalist commodification of linear time during the Popular Front era. Through performances of American racial, gender, and class norms, all of the Asian American protagonists of my study not only reveal the exclusions and limitations of American universalism but also attempt to redeem it by articulating new sets of demands for racial, gender, and class equality. The empirical non-existence of Asian American universalism poses a baseline problem of invisibility and thus the demands of racial egalitarianism mobilized by the "not-yet" of Asian American universalism take the visible or more easily identifiable forms of modernist avant-gardism and progressive gender politics in all four of my chapters.