Monica Chiu
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824838423
- eISBN:
- 9780824869588
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824838423.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field, Don Lee's Country of Origin, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Susan Choi's A Person of Interest. These and a host of ...
More
Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field, Don Lee's Country of Origin, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Susan Choi's A Person of Interest. These and a host of other Asian North American detection and mystery titles were published between 1995 and 2010. Together they reference more than a decade of monitoring that includes internment, campaign financing, espionage, and post-9/11 surveillance involving Asian North Americans. However, these works are less concerned with solving crimes than with creating literary responses to the subtle but persistent surveillance of raced subjects. This book reveals how the Asian North American novels' fascination with mystery, detection, spying, and surveillance is a literary response to anxieties over race. According to the book, this allegiance to a genre that takes interruptions to social norms as its foundation speaks to a state of unease at a time of racial scrutiny. The book is broadly about oversight and insight. The race policing of the past has been subsumed under post-racism. Detective fiction's focus on scrutiny presents itself as the most appropriate genre for revealing the failures of a so-called post-racialism in which we continue to deploy visually defined categories of race as social realities. The book provides a compelling analysis of mystery and detective fiction by Lee, Nina Revoyr, Choi, Suki Kim, Sakamoto, and Hamid, whose work exploits the genre's techniques to highlight pervasive vigilance among Asian North American subjects.Less
Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field, Don Lee's Country of Origin, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Susan Choi's A Person of Interest. These and a host of other Asian North American detection and mystery titles were published between 1995 and 2010. Together they reference more than a decade of monitoring that includes internment, campaign financing, espionage, and post-9/11 surveillance involving Asian North Americans. However, these works are less concerned with solving crimes than with creating literary responses to the subtle but persistent surveillance of raced subjects. This book reveals how the Asian North American novels' fascination with mystery, detection, spying, and surveillance is a literary response to anxieties over race. According to the book, this allegiance to a genre that takes interruptions to social norms as its foundation speaks to a state of unease at a time of racial scrutiny. The book is broadly about oversight and insight. The race policing of the past has been subsumed under post-racism. Detective fiction's focus on scrutiny presents itself as the most appropriate genre for revealing the failures of a so-called post-racialism in which we continue to deploy visually defined categories of race as social realities. The book provides a compelling analysis of mystery and detective fiction by Lee, Nina Revoyr, Choi, Suki Kim, Sakamoto, and Hamid, whose work exploits the genre's techniques to highlight pervasive vigilance among Asian North American subjects.
