The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature

By Christopher Lee

The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identityargues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity.

Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject," which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. He reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge. Harnessing Theodor Adorno's notion of aesthetic semblance, Lee offers an alternative account of identity as a figure akin to modern artwork. Like art, Lee argues, identity provides access to imagined worlds that in turn wage a critique of ongoing histories and realities of racialization.

This book assembles a transnational archive of literary texts by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa, revealing the intersections of subjectivity and representation, and drawing our attention to their limits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9780804783705

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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.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Christopher (Christopher Ming), author.

The semblance of identity : aesthetic mediation in Asian American literature / Christopher Lee.

pages cm.—(Asian America)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-7870-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8047-8370-5 (e-book)

1. American literature—Asian American authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Asian Americans in literature. 4. Ethnicity in literature. 5. Literature—Aesthetics. I. Title. II. Series: Asian America.

PS153.A84L437 2012

810.9'895073—dc23      2011036782

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

The Semblance of Identity

AESTHETIC MEDIATION IN ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Christopher Lee

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 parents, Peter M. and Esther Y. Lee and my grandmother, Po Han Lee

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Post-Identity Condition

1. The Strange Smell of Truth: Ethnicity, Translation, and Realism in the Cold War Writings of Eileen Chang

2. The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism

3. Sound and the Subject in The Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey

4. Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in A Gesture Life

5. Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison

Conclusion: The Difference Asian America Makes

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been an extended exercise in receiving the generosity of teachers, mentors, colleagues, and friends. My greatest debt is to Rey Chow, who has been a model of intellectual rigor, ethical commitment, and good humor; her challenging and generous questions sowed the seeds of this project. Daniel Kim taught me the tools of scholarship—and how to tie a half-Windsor properly. At Brown University, Madhu Dubey, Olakunle George, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Bob Lee, Josefina Saldaña, Rose Subotnik, and Leonard Tennen house were formative teachers and mentors. For their camaraderie through many winters in Providence, I thank Manu Chander, Jim Gatewood, Yogita Goyal, Karen Inouye, Jake Leland, Cheryl Locke, Asha Nadkarni, Zak Sitter, and Gena Zuroski.

Work on this book began in earnest during a year spent at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. I would like to thank Kent Ono, then director of the Asian American Studies program, and the staff, especially Mary Ellerbe and Pia Sengsavanh, for providing a precious environment in which to think and write. For their warm welcome and generous engagement, I am grateful to Poshek Fu, Susan Koshy, Esther Kim Lee, Martin Manalansan, Junaid Rana, Michael Rothberg, and Gary Xu. My fondest memories of Chambana involve long conversations and delicious meals with Mike Masatsugu and Fiona Ngo, as well as Yutian Wong, Bruce Manning, Erin O’Brien, and Wiebke Ipsen, whose absence continues to be felt.

A fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided valuable writing time before I returned to teaching. The Department of English at the University of British Columbia welcomed a former student back as a colleague. As department Heads, Gernot Wieland, Dennis Danielson, and Stephen Guy-Bray have been models of integrity. My life at UBC is greatly enriched by Miranda Burgess, Jennifer Chun, Glenn Deer, Alex Dick, Margery Fee, Adam Frank, Renisa Mawani, Laura Moss, and Lorraine Weir. I am grateful to Sneja Gunew and Tim Cheek for steadfastly supporting junior faculty. I am fortunate to count myself a colleague of the incomparable Larissa Lai, and Mary Chapman’s open door and wisdom have saved me on many occasions. I thank Gu Xiong for generously providing his artwork for the cover of this book. Henry Yu has been an exemplary mentor, colleague, and friend; I have lost track of how I have benefited from his generosity. My students provided many occasions to test my ideas and learn from theirs. Outside of UBC, the wit and common sense of Christine Kim make academic life in Vancouver that much better.

I respectfully thank Russell Leong and Donald Goellnicht for crucial encouragement during the early stages of this project. Audiences at Cornell University, National Taiwan Normal University, and the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Centre for Chinese Studies at UBC provided valuable feedback. For commenting on drafts or generously sharing from their own work, I thank Tim Bewes, Iyko Day, Weihsin Gui, Rob Ho, Hsiu-chuan Lee, Te-hsing Shan, and reviewers at the Journal of Asian American Studies and Modern Fiction Studies. My work is sustained by ongoing conversations with Guy Beauregard, Yu-fang Cho, Iyko Day, Paul Lai, Lisa Mar, Tania Roy, Stephen Sohn, and Andy Chih-ming Wang. Words cannot express my gratitude to Asha Nadkarni, who, since our first seminar in graduate school, has been my most enabling interlocutor and reader; every page of this book is better because of her (all faults are mine of course). As my research assistants, Maia Joseph and Szu Shen graciously tolerated my haphazard record keeping and last-minute requests. I acknowledge the funding support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Brown University Graduate School, and the Faculty of Arts at UBC.

I am grateful to Stacy Wagner, my editor at Stanford University Press, for patiently shepherding this book to completion. I thank Gordon Chang for his support and Jessica Walsh, John Feneron, John Donohue, and Karen Fisher for their stellar efforts in preparing this manuscript for publication. The rigorous feedback, criticism, and encouragement of the anonymous reviewers greatly improved this manuscript. An early version of Chapter 1 was published as Rethinking Realisms through the Writings of Eileen Chang, Amerasia Journal 32.3 (2006): 59–77. A version of Chapter 4 and portions of the Introduction were published as "Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in A Gesture Life," Journal of Asian American Studies 14.1 (2011): 95–116. Copyright © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Portions of the Introduction and Conclusion first appeared in Asian American Literature and the Resistances of Theory, Modern Fiction Studies 56.1 (2010): 19–39. Copyright © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Without the encouragement of Dorothy Fujita-Rony, Imogene Lim, and the late Edgar Wickberg, I would not have gone to graduate school. Countless meals with Hayne Wai over the years have been indispensable for my well-being. Across different time zones, Wei Ying Wong continues to gently humor my obsessions, while closer to home the friendships of Ray Chin, Rob Ho, Tracy Tang, Steve Moss, and Emmanuel Ndabarushimana make life far more meaningful than a mere book. Michelle Tan got me through the final stretch. Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my family. My sister, Janice Lee, and Ben Steinberg know better than to take me seriously. My parents, Peter and Esther Lee, have lived with this book for as long as I have and I could not have finished it without their love, support, and prayers. When I reflect on the unlikely paths that led me to study literature, I trace their beginning to my grandmother, Po Han Lee, who taught me classical Chinese poetry when I was a toddler. Her love has made me who I am and it is to her, as well as to my parents, that this book is dedicated.

Introduction

The Post-Identity Condition

Asian American Studies traces its origins to radical social movements that emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. Invented by scholar-activist Yuji Ichioka at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968, Asian America provided a sense of political and cultural identity for Asians in the United States by appealing to shared histories and experiences of racialization.¹ Although Asian America has undergone tremendous growth since its inception and currently includes a wide spectrum of academic, cultural, political, community, and economic formations, its relevance, coherence, and political efficacy have been extensively questioned. These challenges have undoubtedly been prompted by demographic considerations, especially in light of changes in immigration policy. As long-established Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino American communities experienced renewed growth in the wake of the 1965 Immigration Act, the emergence of newer communities, from Southeast Asian refugees to well-educated professionals from South Asia, greatly expanded the diversity of Asian America.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the fledging field of Asian American Studies repeatedly contended with this ever-increasing internal diversity. Considerable efforts have been directed toward reconfiguring Asian America into a more pluralistic rubric that can be inclusive of, and responsive to, undernoticed groups and constituencies. These efforts, along with those of feminist and queer scholars, have interrogated the constituting assumptions of the field. But as Susan Koshy incisively points out, a continuing investment in the referential capacity of Asian America has had the effect of deferring its decisive emergence to an unspecified future in which everyone has been included [and] the representational truth of the rubric will be made manifest (Fiction 480). What remains to be theorized is how this referential logic gets attached to and, as I will argue below, derives from an identitarian category that was founded as much on political commitment as demographic realities. While demographic shifts continue to shape debates about Asian American culture and politics, the focus of this book is the theoretical logic of this category, a topic that necessitates a return to the fiercely contested notion of identity.

A rich and multifaceted concept that permeates practically all aspects of contemporary life, identity is used in so many discourses that it often becomes slippery and vague. As the students in an Asian American literature class I taught several years ago observed, identity can refer to the predetermined categories through which we make sense of our social status (gender and race, for example) as well as the unique traits and characteristics that define every individual (as in my own identity). Linda Martín Alcoff clarifies this distinction by defining identity as how we are socially located in public, what is on our identification papers, how we must identify ourselves on Census and application forms and the everyday interpolations of social interaction (92). By contrast, subjectivity denotes "who we understand ourselves to be, how we experience being ourselves, and the range of reflective and other activities that can be included under the rubric of our ‘agency’ " (93; emphasis in original).²

Although this study does not follow Alcoff’s precise delineation, it adopts a similar framework by treating identity as a means to conceptualize the relationship between an individual and the historical, cultural, and social conditions that situate his or her life circumstances. The construction and circulation of identities is inseparable from the distribution of economic and social resources, from questions of power and domination that are sedimented in the very labels and categories that we use. For this reason, Asian American Studies has been engaged from its inception with identity politics, a concern rooted in its activist origins. Although identity politics has become synonymous for many with the struggles of minority and marginalized groups for recognition and equality, it is necessary at the outset to understand it in a more general sense, as a pervasive dimension of modern social thought and practice that anchors the political to the formation and promotion of, and/or opposition to, identitarian categories and structures. Alcoff contends that identity politics involves choosing one’s identity as a member of one or more groups as a political point of departure, as the starting point for establishing communities and collectivities (147). Identity politics is inescapable for societies in which categories of race, ethnicity, gender, and so on determine the privileges of some and the domination of others.

In contemporary North America, identity politics has been widely criticized for imposing reductive scripts on individuals and for being mired in counterproductive, and often oppressive, debates over authenticity. As many critics have charged, rigid understandings of identity are often essentialist, marked, Diana Fuss writes, by an insistent belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties that define the ‘whatness’ of a given identity (xi). Kandice Chuh extends this line of critique when she argues that

identity is a teleological narrative as used in a politics of identity, one that posits a common origin and looks toward a common destiny. It is in that sense assimilative, as difference must be elided to foreground resemblance. Another way to understand that elision is to recognize it as constituting the amnesia necessary to sustain a sense of stable identity. (Imagine 33)

Given its anti-racist commitments, Asian American Studies has productively deployed the critique of essentialism in order to expose the pernicious logic of long-standing stereotypes and other racializing discourses.³ What is important for the present discussion, however, is how Asian American identity, which was intended to be an oppositional alternative to such stereo types, has itself been accused of having essentialist tendencies even by those who are otherwise sympathetic to its political commitments. The conundrum of identity politics has arguably been the most intensely debated topic in the field.

This book is indebted to, and builds on, this extensive body of scholarship and criticism in order to consider how the critique of identity politics has reconfigured the parameters of Asian American Studies. Less an argument for or against identity and identity politics, its aim is to explore the consequences of the post-identity turn. My investigation proceeds by tracing the persistence of a theoretical figure that I call the idealized critical subject, which operates throughout Asian American literary culture and cultural criticism as a means of providing coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. I reframe this figure in relation to the aesthetic in order to specify its cognitive structure, which comes to the forefront as it is textualized into literary narrative. The chapters that follow develop these points in relation to texts from different moments in Asian American literary history, which emerges in this study as an ongoing engagement with the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation.

The Post-Identity Turn

For over two decades, debates about identity in Asian American cultural criticism have been generally informed by what Rey Chow, in a slightly different context, calls the difference revolution, the permanent unsettling of the stability of referential meaning, what had been presumed to be anchored in the perfect fit between the signifier and the signified (Protestant Ethnic 128). In light of this revolution, difference rather than sameness now becomes the key to a radicalized way of thinking about identity . . . so that (the experience of) dislocation per se, as it were, often becomes valorized and idealized—as what is different, mobile, contingent, indeterminable, and so on (134). These efforts have thoroughly affected Asian American Studies’ understanding of itself as an intellectual and political project. In their introduction to Asian American Studies: A Reader, Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Min Song write,

The first general claim we can make about Asian American Studies . . . is that it has difficulty defining what its object of study is. Even if we try to split up the notion of Asian American into smaller subgroups, the problem persists. . . . The question remains, however: do these differences invalidate a field of study whose object is admittedly imaginary and constructed? Another way to put this question is: does Asian American Studies foreground, in its difficulty defining an object of study, the imaginary and constructed nature of most, if not all, identities? (xiv)

To a certain extent, these questions are meant to be rhetorical: the answer to the first, as the context makes clear, is no, and as for the second, its quasi-universal claim about most, if not all, identities does not directly address the specific predicament of Asian American Studies, which has never denied the constructed nature of its founding terms. But Wu and Song’s characterization of the field is undoubtedly correct, for not only has it become impossible to speak of Asian America as a coherent entity, but the very critique of identity politics has been widely embraced as valuable and necessary.

These developments have reinforced a narrative in which the essentialist foundations of Asian American Studies unravel under the pressure of subsequent critiques. As Daryl J. Maeda points out, this understanding oversimplifies the history of Asian American culture and activism. Examining debates about literature that unfolded in conjunction with the Asian American movement, he draws our attention to a 1975 conference of writers or ganized by the Combined Asian American Resources Project that was criticized by the San Francisco–based organization Wei Min She for focusing myopically on ‘self-expression’ to promote ‘good vibes’ about being Asian American and being hungup on identity (qtd. in Maeda 151).⁴ As this anecdote shows, the idea of Asian American literature was controversial from the start precisely because its foundational understanding of identity was being contested by different groups struggling to define what was still an incipient formation.

As Asian American literary studies became institutionalized in the years that followed, debates over canon formation functioned as an extension of, and occasionally proxy for, broader questions about identity politics. In the 1980s, scholars mobilized Asian American literature in order to articulate a set of shared historical experiences that could be reflected by this body of texts. In her groundbreaking 1982 study, Elaine H. Kim focuses on published creative writings in English by Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino descent but immediately problematizes this framework as incomplete (Asian American Literature xi). Kim recognizes that Asian America bears a homological similarity to racialized terms such as Oriental but insists on its value for coordinating community building and struggles for social change. This emphasis on anti-racism enables her to avoid essentialist claims about Asian American culture while remaining invested in Asian American literature as such. Sau-ling Wong develops this approach in her 1993 definition of Asian American literature as an emergent and evolving textual coalition, whose interests it is the business of a professional coalition of Asian American critics to promote (Reading 9). Conceiving Asian American literature in parallel with a pan-ethnic coalition in the process of being consolidated in society at large, Wong emphasizes the ability of critics to play a role in building their community because the very process of creating a coalition feeds back into history, to further realize what has hitherto been tentative and unstable (9).

In retrospect, Wong’s account turned out to be one of the last major attempts to align literary criticism with Asian American identity (understood as a nonessentialist formation based on a pan-ethnic concept of Asian America as a politically motivated coalition). The theoretical orientation of the field underwent a significant shift in the 1990s by embarking on what we might call a post-identity turn. First published in 1991, Lisa Lowe’s influential essay Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity: Asian American Differences makes a compelling case for replacing notions of ‘identity’ with multiplicity and shifting the emphasis from cultural ‘essence’ to material hybridity (75). Embracing Stuart Hall’s conception of identity as position rather than essence, she emphasizes the need to rethink racialized ethnic identity in terms of differences of national origin, class, gender, and sexuality rather than presuming similarities and making the erasure of particularity the basis of identity (83). Lowe focuses on the formation of coalitions with non–Asian American groups rather than the coalitional nature of Asian America itself. Asian American identity functions as a position from which to build crucial alliances—with other groups of color, class-based struggles, feminist coalitions, and sexuality-based efforts—in the ongoing work of transforming hegemony (83).

Kandice Chuh’s Imagine Otherwise goes further by attacking the referential assumptions that underscore identity politics. Chuh argues that attempts to adjust, pluralize, or expand the meaning of Asian America cannot but end in a dead end, where one either is or is not found to be a ‘real’ Asian American, whether a particular representation is or is not found to be ‘authentic’ (21). In order to retain its analytical and critical capabilities, she calls for Asian American Studies to reinvent itself into a subjectless discourse (9) consisting of collaborative antagonisms (28) that keep contingency, irresolution, and nonequivalence in the foreground (8). Delineating the limitations of referentiality, she reframes Asian America as a critical position as opposed to an empirical identity, as a means of catalyzing an ongoing process of social critique:

Asian American is/names racism and resistance, citizenship and its denial, subjectivity and subjection—at once the becoming and undoing—and, as such, is a designation for the (im)possibility of justice, where justice refers to a state as yet unexperienced and unrepresentable . . . an endless project of searching out the knowledge and material apparatuses that extinguish some (Other) life ways and that hoard economic and social opportunities only for some. (8)

The striking openness