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The Asian American Writing Movement and Blackness: Race and Gender Politics in Asian American Anthologies

Chong Chon-Smith

in East Meets Black: Asian and Black Masculinities in the Post-Civil Rights Era

This chapter explores Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers and Yardbird Reader 3 and shows how the editors utilize the rhetoric of Black radicalism as a means to conceptualize the racial ... More

This chapter explores Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers and Yardbird Reader 3 and shows how the editors utilize the rhetoric of Black radicalism as a means to conceptualize the racial emasculation of Asian American men from cultural manhood. During the post-civil rights moment of racial realignment, Black radical thought is the counterpoint to forced Asian ethnic assimilation; this Asian-Black sensibility challenges an uncritical complicity with the parable of racial magnetism that suppresses Black revolution. In Aiiieeeee!, the editors employ the vernacular languages, performance styles, and oppositional consciousness of Black masculinity during the formation of the Asian American Writing movement. In Yardbird Reader 3, the personal and professional bonds between Frank Chin and Ishmael Reed are important moments of Afro-Asian bonds in alternative multiethnic publishing. Both anthologies showcase the centrality of Blackness as a conceptual and material basis for Asian American writing to emerge in the post-civil rights era.Less

The Remasculinization of Chinese America: Race, Violence, and the Novel

Viet Thanh Nguyen

in Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America

This chapter looks at the works of Frank Chin and Gus Lee, who follow a long line of American authors before them by writing about how men use violence both to regenerate themselves, and to become ... More

This chapter looks at the works of Frank Chin and Gus Lee, who follow a long line of American authors before them by writing about how men use violence both to regenerate themselves, and to become representatives of a larger ethnic and national community. It is through violence that Asian Americans are first marked by others as aliens, and then marked by themselves as Americans. Chin and Lee take up this irony in their novels Donald Duk, China Boy, and Honor and Duty, which are Asian American examples of the bildungsroman. For these Chinese American authors, using the bildungsroman both proclaims a public identity for themselves and their subjects, and reenacts exclusionary processes of violence found in traditional representations, this time directed at Chinese American women and African American men. These novels demonstrate that violence is an initiation for immigrants, Asian and otherwise, into the complexities of American inclusion and exclusion.Less

Conclusion

Josephine Nock-Hee Park

in Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Politics

The conclusion briefly elaborates the significance of American Orientalism in the formation of Asian American literature. By reconsidering the complex negotiation with Orientalism in the work of the ... More

The conclusion briefly elaborates the significance of American Orientalism in the formation of Asian American literature. By reconsidering the complex negotiation with Orientalism in the work of the figurehead of the ethnic nationalist movement, Frank Chin, this conclusion suggests the persistence and continuing significance of an Orientalist legacy for Asian American literature.Less

Interchapter: Asian/African: Black Presences in Asian American Fiction

Caroline Rody

in The Interethnic Imaginiation: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction

This interchapter offers a history of Asian American fiction's engagement with African Americans and their culture as a contribution to the growing scholarship on African‐Asian American cultural ... More

This interchapter offers a history of Asian American fiction's engagement with African Americans and their culture as a contribution to the growing scholarship on African‐Asian American cultural connections. The two groups have a complex relationship: historically more violently abjected, African Americans are mythologically primary, and have been models for the political emergence of racially “in between” Asian Americans. A thread of connection to blackness appears in Asian American texts in unfulfilled plot segments, brief interludes of affiliation or sympathy for shared histories of minoritization, as in early texts by Younghill Kang, Carlos Bulosan, and John Okada. From the mid‐century, Asian American men's texts evince a paradoxical longing for unity with those more viscerally oppressed, in dramas of deeply vexed engagement with black male models of masculinity; Peter Bacho, Frank Chin, and Gus Lee are discussed. Recent fictions disrupt the Asian‐black binary, representing blacks amidst a more fluid, multiethnic social world. Asian American women's fiction shows a minor, steady strand of sympathetic engagement—unburdened by agonistic competition—with African Americans and black female precursors, who become models for emergent expressivity. Contemporary texts (Gish Jen) reveal class difference inhibiting Asian‐black solidarity, but powerful, ongoing influence by the black expressivity saturating American culture.Less

The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism

in The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature

Asian American Studies as a discipline continues to be informed by the political objectives of cultural nationalism, yet critics have repeatedly exposed the nativism, misogyny, and homophobia ... More

Asian American Studies as a discipline continues to be informed by the political objectives of cultural nationalism, yet critics have repeatedly exposed the nativism, misogyny, and homophobia embedded in its constructions of identity. Despite their emphasis on the mimetic capabilities of literature and the possibility of realism, cultural nationalist critics and writers repeatedly sought to align textual content with the historical terrain in which praxis is actualized. In this sense, realism demands a close connection between the temporality of the text and the time of history. Moreover, cultural nationalism assumed an idealized critical subject for whom the history and realities of racism are accessible as knowledge. This chapter examines cultural nationalism and its ironic temporalities by focusing on literary criticism by Bruce Iwasaki and writings by Frank Chin, along with their claims about the agency of the author. It considers how such claims coexist uneasily with the temporal protocols of political discourse and literary representation.Less

“You Can Stay at My Crib, I Will Show You My ’Hood”: Interethnic Male Friendship

Crystal S. Anderson

in Beyond The Chinese Connection: Contemporary Afro-Asian Cultural Production

This chapter uses Lee’s film Enter the Dragon (1973) to explore the theme of interethnic male friendship between African American and Chinese men in Frank Chin’s novel, Gunga Din Highway, and two ... More

This chapter uses Lee’s film Enter the Dragon (1973) to explore the theme of interethnic male friendship between African American and Chinese men in Frank Chin’s novel, Gunga Din Highway, and two films released since 2000, Rush Hour 2 and Unleashed. Enter the Dragon engages an Afro-Chinese male friendship within the context of an international martial arts tournament in Hong Kong, providing a transnational backdrop that brings ethnic identity and national association into sharp relief.Less

The Political Economy of Minority Literature

Mark Chiang

in The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies: Autonomy and Representation in the University

This chapter examines the origins of the Asian American literary field in the writings of Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston—the authors of the book Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American ... More

This chapter examines the origins of the Asian American literary field in the writings of Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston—the authors of the book Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. These writers subordinate art to politics, and their own self-representation as the “radical” pole of Asian American cultural production. Juxtaposing this subordination with the reading of The Woman Warrior, the chapter argues that the dilemma motivating the narrative is not the anxiety of influence—as in the dominant literary tradition—but the anxiety of representation. Only within and against the writers' relation of representation to the community can they become a representative or an author.Less

Hiroshima/Vietnam/Tule Lake: Asian America and the Third World in the 1970s

Timothy Yu

in Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia

The origin of Asian American political identity was not in cultural nationalism but in diasporic consciousness, most notably in the concept of solidarity with Third World peoples struggling against ... More

The origin of Asian American political identity was not in cultural nationalism but in diasporic consciousness, most notably in the concept of solidarity with Third World peoples struggling against imperialism around the globe. The poetry of Janice Mirikitani juxtaposes locations from Vietnam to Zimbabwe to the Tule Lake internment camp, making transnational political solidarity prior to, not dependent upon, racial identification. In contrast, the anthology Aiiieeeee!, often cited as the origin of Asian American literary politics, emphasizes the integrity of the individual writer over communal identification. Restoring Mirikitani’s place in the history of Asian American literature also restores a coalitional, transnational vision of Asian American politics that lays the groundwork for a contemporary poetics of the Asian diaspora.Less

Epilogue

Nancy Yunhwa Rao

in Chinatown Opera Theater in North America

Drawing from the author’s family history, the epilogue discusses how opera culture could permeate different social classes, accompany dislocation of personal root, and be felt in communities near and ... More

Drawing from the author’s family history, the epilogue discusses how opera culture could permeate different social classes, accompany dislocation of personal root, and be felt in communities near and far. It also traces the impact of Chinatown theaters on the roaring twenties of the United Staete, the use of instruments in jazz, and to the rise of certain branch of American experimental music in the 20th century, as well as the manifestiation in Chinese American cinema and literature.Less