Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Extended Review and Book Reviews

2013; Winchester University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.7227/ercw.4.1.5

1758-8685

James L. W. West, Joe Ellery, Jo Manby,

Christopher Lee reframes the arena of literary/political representation as critically-rather than identity-based, and raises a concept of identity as an aesthetic figure, poised on the intersection of varying knowledge projects and identity politics.This 'idealized critical subject' as he terms it, is comparable to a work of modern or contemporary art -a portal onto worlds of imagination, constantly critiquing histories of racialisation. Lee refers in his study of Asian American literature to a broad range of texts including works by Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje and José Garcia Villa, and opens his introduction at the origins of Asian American Studies, within the radical social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.The book aims to promote readings of Asian American literature that, by using the notion of the 'redemption of semblance' that is 'central to aesthetics' (quoting Theodor Adorno, p.17), can 'illuminate the theoretical structure of race and identity' (p.17).Lee's study is arranged chronologically, although he does not set out to deliver a 'developmental narrative' (p.20) but rather, an examination of the way the focus on 'historicity in Asian American literary and cultural criticism is itself tied to its investment in the ideal/ized critical subject' (pp.20/21), and how this investment surfaces at historical intervals, the framework that links the chosen authors being genealogical rather than linear.Lee begins with the 'transnational Cold War career' (p.23) of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920-95) which offers the possibility of charting a 'prehistory of the Asian American idealized critical subject' (p.23).Chang's career -she was known as a Chinese-language author who focused on Chinese topics, and was opposed to communism, contributing to the 'exercise of American power in the Asia Pacific' (p.23) -incorporated themes that would later resurface in Asian American literary culture.Lee concentrates on Chang's novel The Rice-Sprout Song (1954), set in a village near Shanghai, a form of what he describes as cultural translation, with two main figures , 'the exiled native informant and the oppressed peasant' (p.43).Chapter 2 looks at 'The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism' and from the starting point of time, explores the reasons why literature, specifically that of critic Bruce Iwasaki and co-editor of Aiiieeeee!An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), Frank Chin, became so contested a concept for cultural nationalism.Chin and Iwasaki, through divergent means, both highlight theoretical problems arising from cultural nationalism's 'attempts to imagine a political role for literature' (p.55).Iwasaki selects 'politically enlightened' (p.54) writers as archetypes for Asian American literature while simultaneously deferring that literature to 'an emancipated future that has yet to arrive' (p.54).Chin's is an 'angst-ridden desire for literary achievement' (p.55) that fragments his 'temporal frameworks ….. precisely because his identity politics / unravels in the terrain of the text' (pp.55/56), time a constant struggle to negotiate past and future in a 'racialized society ' (p.56).During the 1980s and 1990s came the 'infamous "Chin-Kingston" debates' (p.73),where Chin as a cultural nationalist disputed with feminist Maxine Hong Kingston in a dialogue about identity, heterogeneity and difference.Kingston's was a new, anti-racist politics making use of 'Chinese culture, family stories, and literary traditions from the United States, China and elsewhere' (p.75).Two of her novels, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts (1976) and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) are discussed in Chapter 3.Chapter 4 ranges in focus from Denise Ferreira da Silva's book, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 'foreground [ing] the dangers of the transparent I and its manifestations as the idealized critical subject ..… ' (p.99), to Lukács's The Theory of the Novel, claiming that '[t]he realist novel is characterized by a self-reflexivity' (p.99), to an examination of Korean American author Chang-rae Lee's novel A Gesture Life (1999) which conflates 'transnational memory and responsibility' (p.99).Chapter 5, 'Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison', deals with the impact of 'new critical rubrics such as diaspora, hemispheric studies, globalization, and polyculturalism, and denationalized frameworks such as Asian North America, the hemisphere, and the Asia-Pacific' (p.121), and takes Sri Lankan Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje's Anil 's Ghost (2000) as its central text.Here, the tensions of a novel that 'ends up confronting its own inability to escape its Western positionality, [with] angst-filled realization that sheds light on the condition of literary representation in the post-colonial world' (p.140), are reiterated in Lee's concluding lines: 'the politics of post-identity inheres precisely in the ongoing work of abandoning Asian American Studies while abandoning ourselves to it' (p.152).