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Since the 1970s, literature by Asian American women writers has made a significant impact on the American literary canon. But despite these gains, this article argues that the reception of Asian American literature is limited not only by aesthetics and literary value, but by several factors specific to the perceived racial and national identity of its authors or characters. Through a reception study of two novels by Nora Okja Keller, Comfort Woman and Fox Girl, Layfield argues that a positive reception of Asian American women's literature depends on several key factors: first, readers want to experience the situation of Asian women; second, the story of this "other" needs to be told in a familiar structure associated with Asian American literature, such as the mother-daughter tale; and finally, this story needs to conform to successful immigration stories in which the heroine reaffirms the importance of the nuclear family and portrays immigration to the United States as a means of salvation.

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.

"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.

Eating Identities' is the first book to link food to a wide range of Asian American concerns such as race and sexuality. Xu provides lucid and informed interpretations of seven Asian American writers (John Okada, Joy Kogawa, Frank Chin, Li-Young Lee, David Wong Louie, Mei Ng, and Monique Truong), revealing how cooking, eating, and food fashion Asian American identities in terms of race/ethnicity, gender, class, diaspora, and sexuality. Most literary critics perceive alimentary references as narrative strategies or part of the background; Xu takes food as the central site of cultural and political struggles waged in the seemingly private domain of desire in the lives of Asian Americans. For students of literature, this tantalizing work offers an illuminating lesson on how to read the multivalent meanings of food and eating in literary texts.

This project seeks to overturn popular misconceptions about Asian American literature by situating it in a political context while also attending to complexities of language and form. Chapter One explores the significance of silence in the work of Toshio Mori, whose Yokohama, California (1949) was the first book of short stories published by a Japanese American in the United States, ultimately finding that Mori's work resists the notion of silence as indicative of "model minority" assimilation. Chapter Two uses Fredric Jameson's problematic theory of Third World "national allegory" as a compelling framework through which to criticize ongoing concerns about the authenticity and literary merit of Asian American literature. With Jameson as a jumping-off point, I consider issues of collective, representation, and canon, as well as the relationship between silence, speech, and writing in Akhil Sharma's Family Life and Chang-Rae Lee's "Faintest Echo of Our Language." Finally, Chapter Three addresses relations between Asian Americans and African Americans, which have been central to both Asian American identity formation and to the roots of Asian American literature; the first seminal anthology of Asian American literature, Aiiieeeee!, was published in 1974 through the Howard University Press. Nonetheless, the work of Aiiieeeee! editor Frank Chin is extremely reliant on racist stereotypes of black hypermasculinity and presents black culture as a means through which to make the male Asian American subject "whole." Idealized and inadequate visions of a "post-racial" future in Lee's Native Speaker and Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats are also discussed, problematizing recent discourse that seeks to "go beyond black and white."

The French epicure and gastronome Brillat-Savarin declared, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are." Wenying Xu infuses this notion with cultural-political energy by extending it to an ethnic group known for its cuisines: Asian Americans. She begins with the general argument that eating is a means of becoming—not simply in the sense of nourishment but more importantly of what we choose to eat, what we can afford to eat, what we secretly crave but are ashamed to eat in front of others, and how we eat. Food, as the most significant medium of traffic between the inside and outside of our bodies, organizes, signifies, and legitimates our sense of self and distinguishes us from others, who practice different foodways. Narrowing her scope, Xu reveals how cooking, eating, and food fashion Asian American identities in terms of race/ethnicity, gender, class, diaspora, and sexuality. She provides lucid and informed interpretations of seven Asian American writers (John Okada, Joy Kogawa, Frank Chin, Li-Young Lee, David Wong Louie, Mei Ng, and Monique Truong) and places these identity issues in the fascinating spaces of food, hunger, consumption, appetite, desire, and orality. Asian American literature abounds in culinary metaphors and references, but few scholars have made sense of them in a meaningful way. Most literary critics perceive alimentary references as narrative strategies or part of the background; Xu takes food as the central site of cultural and political struggles waged in the seemingly private domain of desire in the lives of Asian Americans. Eating Identities is the first book to link food to a wide range of Asian American concerns such as race and sexuality. Unlike most sociological studies, which center on empirical analyses of the relationship between food and society, it focuses on how food practices influence psychological and ontological formations and thus contributes significantly to the growing field of food studies. For students of literature, this tantalizing work offers an ...

By severing the contingency of "Asian American" from essentialist principles governing authorial descent and mimetic contents, this dissertation reads the "Asian American" of Asian American literature as a particular configuration of aesthetic form, namely of fictional form. More specifically, I argue that the contours of what might comprise an Asian American literary archive can be drawn by the archive's formal negotiation with aspects of visuality. This engagement with the visual takes after the critical ambivalences that have framed applications of schemas of the visible and the visual in Asian American Studies' apprehension of Asian racialization in the social, political, and cultural domains. On the one hand, the visual logic of race depends on an optically-grounded epistemology that sutures embodied evidence perceptible to the eye to meaning which is passed off as knowledge. Scholars have deftly denaturalized these "common sense" notions, leading to the valuable interrogation of the social and historical construction of normalized ways of seeing and apparatuses of racialization. On the other hand, metaphors of visibility and invisibility used to understand the politics of representation have shaped and continue to shape our thinking about the racialized distribution of power and possibilities for transformative social change. This dissertation additionally revisits Susan Koshy's characterization of "Asian American" as a catachresis that signals dissimulation through its analytical inadequacy by rereading catachresis as a strategy intended to lend legible form to unmarked racialized experiences. The texts taken up by this project are concerned with the way the visual has contributed to experiences of oppression, but moreover display investments in recuperating the visual as a mode of responsive resistance. Legibility means mounting the process by which these forms of the visual contribute to racialization, but also the ways in which these forms of the visual are indispensable to these texts' self-imagining as Asian American literature. Accordingly, in order to demonstrate the consistency with which the visual inflects Asian American literary form, the selection of texts in this dissertation occupies a wide historical range.