Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Transnational Novels

By Jinqi Ling

Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways. In Across Meridians, Jinqi Ling offers readers the most critically engaged examination to date of Yamashita's literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, Ling's study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism.

Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North-South vector into the East-West conceptual paradigm, Ling highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, Ling designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, Ling sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, he argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9780804782043

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

Published with the assistance of the Edgar M. Kahn Memorial Fund.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ling, Jinqi, author.

Across meridians : history and figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s transnational novels / Jinqi Ling.

pages    cm.—(Asian America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-7801-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8047-8204-3 (e-book)

1. Yamashita, Karen Tei, 1951—Criticism and interpretation. 2. American fiction—Asian American authors—History and criticism. 3. Asians in literature. 4. Transnationalism in literature. 5. Literature and transnationalism. I. Title. II. Series: Asian America.

PS3575.A44Z76    2012

813′.54—dc23         2011051603

Typeset by Westchester Book Composition in Adobe Garamond, 11/14

Across Meridians

HISTORY AND FIGURATION

IN KAREN TEI YAMASHITA’S

TRANSNATIONAL NOVELS

Jinqi Ling

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

ASIAN AMERICA

A series edited by Gordon H. Chang

The increasing size and diversity of the Asian American population, its growing significance in American society and culture, and the expanded appreciation, both popular and scholarly, of the importance of Asian Americans in the country’s present and past—all these developments have converged to stimulate wide interest in scholarly work on topics related to the Asian American experience. The general recognition of the pivotal role that race and ethnicity have played in American life, and in relations between the United States and other countries, has also fostered the heightened attention.

Although Asian Americans were a subject of serious inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were subsequently ignored by the mainstream scholarly community for several decades. In recent years, however, this neglect has ended, with an increasing number of writers examining a good many aspects of Asian American life and culture. Moreover, many students of American society are recognizing that the study of issues related to Asian America speak to, and may be essential for, many current discussions on the part of the informed public and various scholarly communities.

The Stanford series on Asian America seeks to address these interests. The series will include works from the humanities and social sciences, including history, anthropology, political science, American studies, law, literary criticism, sociology, and interdisciplinary and policy studies.

A full list of titles in the Asian America series can be found online at www.sup.org/asianamerica.

For my mother

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Acknowledgments

1

The Politics of Geography: Or, a Troping of Asian American Spatial Imagination

2

Southward Migration: Empire Building and Transculturation in Brazil-Maru

3

Subterranean Transnationality: Race, Affect, and Material Form in Circle K Cycles

4

Writing against Reification: Temporality and Popular Genre in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

5

Thinking Magic, Reinventing the Real: Consciousness and Decolonization in Tropic of Orange

6

Toward a Critical Internationalism: Nation, Revolt, and Performance in I Hotel

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Preface

This book presents a study of the entire body of Karen Tei Yamashita’s works of fiction, not as an attempt to establish interpretation for its own sake, but as a way of assessing the significance of Yamashita’s literary output as a form of the Asian American literary avant-garde, as well as the theoretical ramifications of her literary intervention for current Asian American creative and critical practices. The critical attention I give Yamashita’s works in this study perhaps needs little justification in view of the fact that, more than any other contemporary Asian American writer, she has contributed to the reshaping of the Asian American literary imagination during the past two decades. Such a transformation in the field, already under way in tentative forms prior to Yamashita’s entry into the world of Asian American letters, is symptomatic of a larger shift in the humanities and social sciences generally. I refer here to the transnational turn, in response to at least two concerns arising from the mid-1980s: the impact of globalization as a socioeconomic phenomenon and, correspondingly, the denationalization of literary studies, reflecting changes wrought in the globalization process. As part of this turn, Asian American literature was no longer seen as being rooted in the United States, since a growing number of writers addressed both the home and settlement countries, while continued global migration enabled Asian American literature to be perceived as simultaneously local and transnational, rather than only as a subordinate category of American literature. I see Yamashita’s novelistic practice, beginning with the publication of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and continuing to the present, as constituting a series of defining moves in this transnational shift. These moves have gone the furthest of any writer’s in opening up horizons for Asian American creative and critical work, and yet they have also remained the most qualified—that is, concrete and circumspect—in making their claims. With the former observation, I refer to Yamashita’s unprecedented mapping of the trajectories of Asians’ globality beyond the familiar conceptual and operational categories; with the latter, I emphasize her insistence on envisioning Asians’ spatial and geographical mobility through material praxis that registers the crisscrossing forces of history, circumstance, and activism.

In assessing the nature of Yamashita’s contributions to Asian American literary practice in these ways, I use the relationship between history and figuration as a general way of organizing my discussion throughout. The importance I attach to the notion of history derives from my view that transnationalism, as a formation produced largely by forces of capital accumulation, often manifests itself as a spatial problematic, with reductive consequences for literary representation in general and peripheral literary articulations in particular. Within this context, I use history specifically to suggest the need for reclaiming an Asian American self-representational space that is antithetical to the logic of reification. By figuration, I refer to formal embodiments of attempts to reclaim history in Yamashita’s novels. I see such figural representations of history—be they generic, structural, or linguistic—as fraught with the tensions arising from Yamashita’s negotiation with competing imperatives across shifting sites, and from social conditions that mark these efforts as sensuous—and politically ambivalent—projections. In working through the simultaneously historical and figurative commitments of Yamashita’s writing, I hope to arrive at a clear understanding of the dialectical nature of her artistry as a form of temporally conscious and socially grounded discourse.

My examination of Yamashita’s literary corpus includes not only her more celebrated works, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and Tropic of Orange (1997), but also her less often discussed novels, Brazil-Maru (1992), Circle K Cycles (2001), and I Hotel (2010). In analyzing these texts, I have a dual purpose in mind. On the one hand, I wish to use my analyses to engage with and articulate Yamashita’s political and aesthetic agendas; on the other, I regard them as a way of participating in dialogues that mark the reception of Yamashita’s works as a process of dynamic ideological transcoding constitutive of larger debates. The reading strategy I adopt involves extension, revision, or recoding of Yamashita’s politics through my own critical methods, which I see as spatial-materialist and neohistoricist in orientation, methods that may in themselves be problematic and therefore in need of constant examination.

In this study, I take seriously the unevenness of the reception of Yamashita’s novels, and view it as a symptom of how the novels challenge readers through their deployment of different regimes of knowledge or formal strategies, and as a reflection of the extent to which readers are differently situated in a global process marked by disjunction and conflict. I believe that an adequate grasp of the range and historicity of Yamashita’s artistry cannot be achieved through a partial reading of her works. Conversely, a fuller understanding of the nature of Yamashita’s politics and aesthetics makes available previously uninvestigated factors or contexts for meaning in her novels, which tend to be reduced, especially when analyzed in isolation, to interpretations based on contingent needs, individual preferences, or even sweeping generalizations. Accordingly, my study identifies in her oeuvre a sharable structure of feeling, to use a concept from Raymond Williams (1977, 132–134), that not only connects the five novels under examination but also finds in them a consistent point of view, tenor, and affective force that are at once provocatively unconventional and irreducibly Asian American.

In considering Yamashita’s five novels, I do not follow the order of their publishing sequence, since the array of topics they cover fluctuates and the spatiotemporal range they register shifts, breaks, and reconnects. However, these novels do fall into two basic groups in their approach to representation within a general framework of postnationality: those adopting extraterritorial perspectives and dealing with events outside the United States, and those adopting partial or complete U.S. points of view or fictional settings. I use these two interrelated narrative perspectives to divide my examination of the body of Yamashita’s works into two clusters: Brazil-Maru, Circle K Cycles, and Through the Arc of the Rain Forest in one group, and Tropic of Orange and I Hotel in the other. At the same time, I hope that the interpretive order I have established can be viewed holistically as a reflection of my own politics of reading. That is, Yamashita’s extraterritorial critique of the nation-state does not aim, as some suggest, simply to let go of territorial logics so that Asian American studies can embark on a deconstructive journey of centrifugal dispersion. Rather, her critique is an effort to reengage the material force fields of the nation-state with an enhanced denationalizing consciousness, one to be gained only through a genuinely critical and comparative perspective. Such reengagement does not assume a continuing legitimacy of the classificatory categories of the nation-state; instead, it recognizes the nation-state’s inherent contradictions, which must be seized upon through narrative interventions, as well as its potential for being opened up from both inside and outside through situated struggles and activism. More specifically, in my examination of Yamashita’s texts, I use Brazil-Maru—a novel that chronicles significant Japanese immigration to Brazil in the pre–World War II period—to give context to my analysis of Circle K Cycles, which brings to light the exploitation of and discrimination against Brazilian-born Japanese manual laborers in contemporary Japan. This ironic cycle of Nikkei migration across temporal breaks and changed circumstances then becomes a necessary background for my discussion of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, in which a young, unemployed Japanese railroad technician travels to Brazil in the early 1990s in search of happiness, only to witness destruction of the Amazon rain forest, an imagined disaster caused by the relentless reach of global capital, traceable to its U.S. origins. My analysis of these three novels anticipates the next two works in the study, Tropic of Orange and I Hotel, both involving the West Coast of the United States. This topographically inflected interpretive scheme reflects my own assessment of how geography should relate to politics in a reflexive, transnational way, a relationship I hope to provoke the reader of Yamashita’s novels into seriously considering.

Overall, I identify three primary contributions Yamashita has made to transnational Asian American literary practice. First is her reconstitution of knowledge about Asian American experiences by incorporating in the existing East-West paradigm a South-North perspective as an intersecting and asynchronous view open to further narrative and ideological arrangements. The significance of such a spatiotemporal realignment of the field lies not so much in its alternative geographical designations as in the prominence it gives to issues of economic disparity, class privilege, and neocolonial dependence, which tend to be obscured by an exclusive emphasis on the discursive procedures of Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism that have strongly informed Asian American cultural studies since the mid-1980s. Second is her intervention in an increasingly commercialized American culture by practicing a kind of innovative fictional art that I describe as Asian American literary avant-garde. I see Yamashita’s literary innovation as a cultural campaign waged on two fronts: to wrest aesthetic modalities from the culture industry by reappropriating hegemonic cultural forms, hence setting limits to the function of those cultural forms in society; and, through such reconstituted cultural-aesthetic forms, to revitalize Asian American literature as a mode of politically engaged art, one that is no less subject to the reductionism of America’s late capitalist culture. These textual efforts of Yamashita, I suggest, interact dynamically with her spatial campaigns to remap the field’s epistemic configuration. Third is her fashioning of a micropolitical strategy for building interethnic and interdisciplinary alliances through literary representation, both beyond ethnocentrism and within a self-consciously maintained Asian American historicity. I see Yamashita’s approach as countering popular trends in recent Asian American cultural studies that construct multiethnic textual coalitions through critical projects, in which Asian American literary expression participates only in a token fashion. Such trends have the effect of reproducing liberal scenarios of postnationality based on perceptions of interracial and interethnic voluntarism, while they implicitly delegitimize collective oppositional programs proposed by Asian American literary scholars as a unity in difference.

Chapter 1 of this book offers a theoretical discussion of the contributions made by Yamashita in relation to debates over postmodern space and location, literary avant-garde and commercial and mass cultural forms, and the question of referent in Asian American cultural studies. Chapter 2 analyzes Brazil-Maru by situating its portrayal of the government-sponsored Japanese emigration to Brazil during the interwar years in three interrelated contexts: the worldwide expansion of the Japanese Empire, anti-Japanese legislation in the United States, and the reproduction of modernity in Japanese farming colonies in Brazil under the leadership of emigrant elites. I focus on several aspects of the novel as fraught with ideological tension: utopia as an imperial imaginary ideal, the primitive as a racially inflected signifier, and Creole self-fashioning as a way for Japanese immigrants to differentiate themselves from the imperial discourse into which they are unknowingly interpellated. Chapter 3 focuses on the representational politics and, to a lesser extent, formal properties in Circle K Cycles, a patchwork of unrelated written and visual entries that simulate the hybrid presence as well as the existential dilemmas of dekasegi, the descendants of early Japanese immigrants to Brazil, who work in contemporary Japan as socially marginalized manual laborers. One aspect I discuss is Yamashita’s experiment with the postmodern technique of collage, as well as her provocative mixing of sociological reportage with fictional representation at various junctures of the book. Chapter 4 analyzes Through the Arc of the Rain Forest in terms of its critique of the logic of reification. A significant portion of my discussion is devoted to exploring Yamashita’s spatial politics, especially her articulation of a future-oriented consciousness through apocalyptic visions, and her engagement with the subliterary genre of science fiction and the popular cultural form of soap opera. Chapter 5 discusses Tropic of Orange as a narrative that simulates a process of decolonization on geographical, cultural, linguistic, and psychological levels. My examination emphasizes both the importance and the difficulty of acquiring historical consciousness as a precondition for disrupting the territorial assumptions and logics of colonialism. Issues discussed include Yamashita’s employment of magical realism as a historical form, her use of visual, aural, and carnivalesque figurations to create a temporal space of intervention, her commentary on the limitations of cybernetic freedom, and her articulation of historicist commitments through apocalyptic imaginations. Chapter 6 analyzes I Hotel as Yamashita’s re-visioning of the Asian American social movement of the 1960s and 1970s through the lens of critical internationalism, as well as her attempt to negotiate the temporal gap between movement politics and current discourses on transnationality in Asian American cultural studies, which typically treat the former as an instance of nationalist entrapment. My discussion revolves around the novel’s formal structure, its dramatization of the tensions between revolution and desire, its exploration of movement-related gender and sexual politics, and its performative reenactment of the spirit of the movement in the face of its decline. This study concludes with perspectives on the problem of interpretively establishing Yamashita as a global novelist, and on the need to listen to the specificity of her voice as an ethics of interpreting the meaning and significance of her novels.

Acknowledgments

The content of this book took shape over a period of five years and is a product of efforts beyond my own. I am indebted to Karen Tei Yamashita, whose social and artistic visions inspired me to work on this project. If my attempt to articulate the significance of her writings appears unsatisfactory, it reveals, perhaps more than anything else, the profundity and richness of her thought world, of which the chapters that follow are but tentative reflections. I am very grateful to Marilyn Aquizola, Ali Bhedad, Katherine Hayles, Eleanor Kaufman, Rachel Lee, Michael North, David Palumbo-Liu, Rafael Perez-Torres, Shu-mei Shih, Richard Yarborough, Stephen Yenser, and David Yoo for reading and responding to parts of the manuscript at different stages of their development, and to Colleen Lye and Eric Sundquist for reading and critiquing the manuscript in its entirety. These individuals gave my project the benefit of interest and offered extremely enabling suggestions and criticisms. The current shape of my project benefited in no small measure from the detailed critical comments made by the anonymous readers assigned to my manuscript by Stanford University Press. All these interventions were crucial to making the final version of my manuscript stronger. I alone am responsible for any remaining errors and mistakes that result from my misinterpretation of the advice given to me.

I owe special thanks to Fredric Jameson for allowing me to audit a seminar he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2008 on Karl Marx’s Capital. This experience gave me the confidence to comment on aspects of Yamashita’s work that deal with commodity, value, labor, and market. Some of the archival research for this book was conducted at the College of Literature, Tianjin Normal University, China, where I taught, as a Distinguished Professor of Tianjin, during the summers between 2008 and 2011. Colleagues at UCLA were very generous in giving help and support while I prepared my manuscript for submission and publication. Foremost among them are David Yoo, who expressed confidence in my project and gave me professional advice, and Lane Hirabayashi, Mary Kao, Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Russell Leong, Emily Morishima, Glenn Omatsu, and Kyeyoung Park, who offered stimulating observations or research leads that found their way into various parts of the book. Charles Ling, Arnold Pan, and Bronson Tran provided technical assistance for special characters and symbols used in my text, as well as for my annotations in the page proofs. I cannot overemphasize my gratitude to the help offered by three graduate students at UCLA: Paul J. Nadal and Jeff Schroeder for their invaluable research assistance, and Sharon Chon for her dedicated work on the proofing, formatting, and indexing of the final manuscript.

Portions of this book began as presentations at the annual conferences of the American Studies Association and originally appeared under the following titles in Amerasia Journal: Before and after Orientalism (2005), Forging a North-South Perspective: Nikkei Migration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Novels (2006), and a book review of I Hotel (2010). I wish to thank the journal editor for permitting me to use some of this material in my book. My work benefited from a sabbatical leave from 2007 to 2008, and was helped by the continuing financial support of UCLA’s Academic Senate and the Asian American Studies Center, and by a UCLA Institute of American Culture Research Grant in 2007.

I am very grateful to the staff at Stanford University Press who made the publication of this book in its Asian America series possible. I especially want to thank Stacy Wagner for being a patient and insightful acquisitions editor and for generously consulting on matters of book title and cover design; Mariana Raykov for her careful supervision over the book’s production; John Donohue and Julie Ericksen Hagen, the team assigned to edit my manuscript, for their efficient work; and Gordon Chang, the series editor, for his attention and care throughout the process.

Finally, I want to thank Jiazhen Shi and Charles Ling, my immediate family, for their love and patience.

ONE

The Politics of Geography

Or, a Troping of Asian American Spatial Imagination

There are real geographies of social action, real as well as metaphorical territories and spaces of power that are the sites of innumerable differences that have to be understood both in their own right and within the overall logic of capitalist development. Historical materialism, in short, must take its geography seriously.

—David Harvey, From Space to Place and Back Again (1993)

Stylization involves a sideways glance at others’ languages, at other points of view and other conceptual systems.

—Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (1981)

Imagination has a history. . . . Imagination also has a structure, at once grammatical and historical, in the tenses of past, present and future.

—Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (1984)

From the inception of Asian American studies as an academic discipline, hardly any discussion of its literary or cultural production could be meaningfully conducted without evoking the conceptual categories of the East and the West. The former is generally used to refer to Asia—in its narrow and broad senses—and its variously subjugated histories, populations, and experiences under Western capitalism. The latter signifies, within the context of the Asian American cultural revival of the 1960s and the 1970s, mainly North America, with its Eurocentric, imperial, and racial practices toward Asians both in the East and in the West. This East-West analytic has achieved a near-paradigmatic status for Asian American studies since the mid-1980s, due largely to the enabling influence of Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism. For many Asian Americans, Said’s demystification of the workings of this inferiorizing Western cultural mechanism provides a bona fide critical idiom with which to describe the density and intensity of their existential dilemma as America’s long-designated Oriental subject.¹ At the same time, Said’s theory furnishes Asian American cultural criticism with much-needed intellectual tools for deconstructing falsified knowledge about Asians and Asian Americans through Orientalist technologies—tools mainly consisting of discourse analysis, literary figuration, and epistemological positioning (Ahmad 1992, 163; Moore-Gilbert 1997, 38). To some extent, Asian American cultural studies has emerged as a dynamic and fruitful critical practice since the mid-1980s mainly through its adoption of Said’s critical insights as a kind of foundational theory for the field.² How, then, do Karen Tei Yamashita’s fictional writings—which use South America as a major frame of reference to represent Asian and Asian American experiences—figure in such critical analysis? What are the ramifications of introducing a South-North perspective into Asian American studies, where the critical sensibility, given the predominantly Far Eastern constituency in the Asian American population, remains invested in an East-West approach? In what ways does Yamashita’s complication and redefinition of the spatial, ideological, and linguistic boundaries of Asian American literary creation and criticism alter the field’s epistemic configuration, as well as its political commitments? This chapter intends to answer these questions by examining several aspects of Yamashita’s global imagination in relation to contemporary Asian American literary practice: (1) its spatiotemporal realignment of the field as a way of reprioritizing socioeconomic concerns in Asian American literary representations; (2) its mediation of this rehistoricizing effort through formal innovations that I describe as Asian American literary avant-garde; and (3) its fashioning of an explicitly interdisciplinary and multiethnic representational method within a self-consciously maintained Asian American historicity, an approach that I see as both allowing the field to renew itself as a viable collective project and setting limits to an excessively self-deconstructive impulse in the field informed by an uncritical application of various posthumanist theoretical models.

Toward a Southerly View: A Question of Referent

In a 2006 interview, Yamashita describes her choice of a South-North perspective in the four novels she had published by that time as originating from her desire to know her family history in Japan during the mid-1970s, as well as from her simultaneous interest in exploring possible connections between such a history, her own experience as a third-generation Japanese American growing up in Southern California, and her incidental discovery of the existence of large Japanese diasporas in contemporary Brazil (Shan 2006, 123–128). That Yamashita made these transnational linkages when the majority of Asian Americans were still enthralled in a U.S.-based cultural nationalism bespeaks an important yet little acknowledged dimension of her intellectual and political formation. Her decision to do so seems to have been shaped by two particular sets of circumstances. The first is the influence on her of Paul Riesman, a professor of cultural anthropology in her undergraduate years, as well as the son of David Riesman, who wrote The Lonely Crowd (Shan 2006, 128). It is apparently through Riesman’s intellectual guidance that Yamashita read Claude Lévi-Strauss’s seminal work Tristes Tropiques ([1955] 1974), a uniquely sensory critique, according to Clifford Geertz, of the consequences of Western colonialism for the environment of Brazil (1996, 157).³ This incidental anthropological influence seems to have stayed with Yamashita, at least to some extent; years later she approvingly cited Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques both in the author’s note to her first novel, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, and in her discussion of the Brazilian tradition of saudade in her fourth book, Circle K Cycles. The second is Yamashita’s own experience in Brazil from 1975 through 1984, initially under a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship that supported her study of early Japanese immigration to Brazil. During her sojourn, Yamashita immersed herself in Brazilian society, married a Brazilian man, raised her family, and became local enough to think and feel in Brazilian terms (Murashige 1994, 49–51). These formative developments in her life find their expression in the way Yamashita uses the terms North and South in her writings. By the former, she often refers, in consonance with the popular sentiment of South Americans, to the United States; by the latter, she explicitly means South America, a reference well understood not only by the South Americans living beyond the U.S. borders but also by Hispanics and Latinos in various parts of the United States (Shan 2006, 128, 134).

Since anthropology does mediate Yamashita’s global imagination to some extent, and since the relationship between anthropology and literature remains problematic, some contextualization of how Yamashita uses anthropology to fashion her transnational research into a literary undertaking is necessary here. Interaction between anthropology and literature, as a traditional Euro-American intellectual practice, dates back to the early decades of the twentieth century and is exemplified in James Frazer’s evolutionary comparative method; Émile Durkheim’s exploration of primitive collectivity or savage solidarity; Lévi-Strauss’s study of mythic origins; and Northrop Frye’s archetypal criticism and its ritualistic prescriptions (see Pecora 1997, 217–219; White 1978, 57–59).