Asian North American Identities
The nine essays in Asian North American Identities investigate how Asian North American subjects have undergone significant transformation in recent years. The authors explore the alternative and inventive ways in which Asian North Americans imagine, articulate, and represent themselves as subjects in a wide variety of cultural forms, including novels, art, photography, poetry, and film. Moving beyond the dichotomies of the Old world and the New, and the East and the West, the volume draws on models of ethnic identity that reflect the heterogeneity and transnationality of Asian North Americans. The essays examine alliances and differences among Asian North Americans, and their relation to other ethnic groups; study ways in which writers experiment with form in order to interrogate the process of self-representation; and look at strategies used to escape the identities imposed on them by history, the media, high and low culture, and political and legal discourses.
ISBN 0-253-34380-1 (cloth)
ISBN 0-253-21661 (paper)
Asian North American Identities: Beyond the Hyphen
Eleanor Ty and Donald Goellnicht, Editors
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction– ELEANOR TY and DONALD GOELLNICHT i
1. "Affect-Identity: The Emotions of Assimilation, Multiraciality, and Asian American Subjectivity" 15
JEFFREY J. SANTA ANA
2. "‘I’m Blackanese’: Buddy-Cop Films, Rush Hour and Asian American and African American Cross-Racial Identification"43
LEILANI NISHIME
3. "‘To Hide Her True Self’: Sentimentality and the Search for an Intersubjective Self in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman" 61
PATRICIA CHU
4. "Identities in Process: The Experimental Poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim" 84 JEANNIE YU-MEI CHIU
5. "Asian America is in the Heartland: Performing Korean Adoptee Experience" 102
JOSEPHINE LEE
6. "‘A task of reclamation’: Subjectivity, Self–Representation, and Textual Formulation in Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days"117
ROCIO G. DAVIS
7. "The Transnational Imagination: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange" 130
CAROLINE RODY
8. "At the Edge of a Shattered Mirror, Community?" 149
KARLYN KOH
9. "Claiming Post-Colonial America: The Hybrid Asian-American Performances of Tseng Kwong Chi" 170 MALINI JOHAR SCHUELLER
Bibliography 187
Contributors 201
Index 205
