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The pandemic has rearticulated racial discourses in unprecedented ways and at an accelerating pace. The resurgent protests of Black Lives Matter demand fundamental changes in the criminal (in)justice system and racial relations in the US beyond the Black–white dichotomy. In this paper, I argue that our current shared struggles require a new form of internationalism against the rapid right-wing turn of global hegemonies that does not draw lines between the simple binaries of “East vs. West,” “white vs. Black,” or “authoritarianism vs. democracy,” but in the interconnected fights against the militarized police state, neoliberal capitalist order, Han supremacy, and the continued impacts of Euro-American coloniality.

Through a close reading of the tropes of interlingual and historical translation in Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel, A Tale for the Time Being, this essay argues that an attention to forms of translational work has important implications for transnational American studies, particularly in reorienting the field beyond its continental US and anglocentric bounds. Taking as its primary object of inquiry the “voluminous influx” of national, racial, and linguistic ‘otherness’ that David Palumbo-Liu describes as “a distinct feature of late twentieth century and early twenty first century age of globalization,” A Tale for the Time Being highlights translation’s central (and often acknowledged) role in shaping the ways in which that otherness is negotiated across geographical and temporal meridians. My reading of the novel’s translational form is twofold. I begin by considering the import of this intervention to the field of Asian American literary studies, focusing on how Ozeki mobilizes the formal elements of interlingual translation to push back against naturalizing conceptions of Asian / American identity. I then apply this translational framework to the divergent accounts of history in the novel, and argue that—by calling attention to the fissures and gaps in these narratives—Ozeki offers a new model of empathic reading, one that draws herself and her readers together through a logic of “not knowing.”

Excerpted from Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

Excerpted from Stephen Hong Sohn, Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

This essay examines the relationships of performing bodies to elaborate “Asian/American corporeal citations” and argues that such citations create the grounds for a politics of mobility. Revisiting and extending Sau-ling Wong’s theoretical engagement with “myths of mobility,” it specifically uses the nexus of mourning, performance, and racialization to rearticulate modes of cultural passing by constructing a lineage through several men: screen star Toshiro Mifune, actor Lane Nishikawa (who invokes Mifune through Nishikawa’s elegiac solo piece Mifune and Me), and the author (disciplined through acting classes with Nishikawa). The stakes of re-membering are further articulated through the interweaving of the bodily acts associated with the death of the author’s grandfather, Bo Jung. Joining the principal argument with this more personal reflection is an attempt to think through the implications of Nishikawa’s theatrical memorial and to grapple with loss and the complex, nonlinear structures of memory that attend it. Ultimately, all the cultural transmissions discussed place the body at the center of transnational, racial, and ethnic discourses. In so doing, the essay revises kinship as the foundation for what might otherwise be too easily read as diasporic cultural productions.

The 2008 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival presented three narrative films, Never Forever, Pretty to Think So, and West 32nd, with suggestively similar interests. Namely, all three films focus on “horizontal” (rather than intergenerational) conflicts between characters distinguished by class, legal status, and migration history but connected by ethnic or racial identifications. This article argues that the films, individually and collectively, participate in ongoing deliberations about the borders of Asian America by juxtaposing and organizing distinct models of conceiving Asian American identity. In particular, the films suggest the limitations of privileging certain formations of Asian America over others by both dramatizing and embodying their uneasy coexistence. Tensions between minority, immigrant, and diasporic positions become evident not only through their plots, characterizations, and stylistic elements but also in their complex production and distribution histories. The films together highlight the necessity of attending to the difficult questions of ethnic and racial identification and material inequity that are manifest when the various narratives of affiliation and difference espoused by each model encounter one another.

In her recent work, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong draws critical attention to the implications of the formation of an Asian American “diaporic community” in cyberspace, where race still operates as an organizing principle of power relations. Although cyberspace is not confined by national borders, Wong examines how subversion of and intervention in race- and sex-based hierarchies in cyberspace can articulate Asian American identities in relation to diasporas and the nation-state. This essay explores the politics of artistic invention in diasporas as embedded in the disruption, dislocation, and fragmentation in Ming-Yuen S. Ma’s multi-media project, Xin Lu: A Travelogue in Four Parts—a series of four experimental videos about Chinese diasporas. It argues that by moving outside the nation-space into the experiential and virtual “global space” of diasporas, Ma’s work addresses Wong’s concerns and enacts a viable “virtual mediation” that situates Chinese diasporas in the historical contexts of British colonialism and American racial exploitation and exclusion. This movement also entails confronting other forms of oppression, including sexism and heterosexism in both the East and West. While giving voice and visibility to the struggles of racial and sexual minorities across national borders, Ma demonstrates the possibilities of a historicized critical approach to diasporas, one which underlies Wong’s insistence in critiquing gendered and racialized power structures both within and outside the nation-state.

Caught having an affair while employed at the home of the governor-general of Saigon, Vietnamese cook, migrant worker, and narrator of Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, Binh, is cast out of his natal home, and sets off for the open sea, winding up as a live-in cook in the household of lesbian couple Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. As an abstract source of labor and culinary pleasure to those he encounters in Paris, Binh concludes, despondently, that he is, “nothing but a series of destinations with no meaningful expanses in between.” Yet the “expanses in between,” most notably in reference to waterways, allude to a central trope of Vietnamese culture. Incorporating Vietnamese symbolism with formative migratory experiences, this essay argues that Truong constructs a subject who can be read through both affective forms of national belonging as well as a broader queer diasporic community. It also explores Binh’s percipient tongue as one that is ever critical of the dynamics of power and privilege, and ever sensitive to the variances in salt (of sea, sweat, tears). The Book of Salt thus mediates the possibility of a gustatory epistemology and community constituted in the sensate, attuned to divergent experiences of mobility, labor, and love.

In 1953, Chiang Yee, a Chinese American travel writer and artist, began to write and exchange Chinese-language dayou poems with Yang Lien-sheng, a Harvard professor. These poems, seemingly casual, unrestrained, humorous, and sometimes emotional, reflected the sentiments of diaspora poets, their feelings about displacement, profession, language, and home. This article is a study of the cultural and literary significance of these dayou poems. Written during the Cold War era by Chinese scholars, they stand in sharp contrast with mainstream publications in both China and America. They are not merely an instance of Chinese poetic form being practiced overseas; when examined against their sociocultural context, these verses raise significant issues concerning displacement and homeland, career and cultural identity, and “mother tongue” and public expression. They reveal an ethos that diaspora poets have never publicly manifested in their English-language writings. Thus, a study of these dayou poems may deepen our understanding about Asian American literature, lead to a better appreciation of writing in languages other than English, and open up a new, exciting topic within Asian American Studies.

Gish Jen’s 2004 novel The Love Wife highlights the foreign presence within American national boundaries but plays with the reader’s expectations of a novel of immigration to deconstruct the categories of citizen and immigrant, foreigner and native, protagonist and antagonist, host and guest. This blurring between antagonist and protagonist in the novel captures the dynamics of hospitality: through a delicate series of adjustments, concessions, and compromise, guest and host can exchange places with one another. Tapping into fears particularly emergent in the post-9/11 era of immigrants as poised to infiltrate America, Jen’s novel engages with the anxiety evoked by the foreigner’s presence but complicates this notion through her careful examination of the ethnic- and gender-inflected dimensions of that response, as well as through the resolution of the plot. Considering the trope of hospitality within contemporary Asian American works also helps illuminate fiction’s role in evolving definitions of “Asian American” and “America” in the “post-national” era.

In the summer of 1928 in Berlin, the noted German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Chinese American actress Anna May Wong (1905–1961) shared an unlikely encounter that set in relief European and American conceptions of modernity as well as white European intellectual and American racial minority cosmopolitanisms. On July 6, 1928, Benjamin published the results as “Gespräch mit Anne May Wong” [“Speaking with Anna May Wong: A Chinoiserie from the Old West”] on the front page of the leading German literary review, Die Literarische Welt. Read against a cache of Wong’s writings, the encounter and the writings are significant for how they intervene in constructions of cosmopolitanism and racial and gendered difference. This encounter raises questions concerning the relationship between Asian America, modernity, race, gender, and cosmopolitanism, linking notions of cosmopolitanism to a discourse of race in the transnational American context. Benjamin’s struggles in fully characterizing Wong also point to the antagonism between racialized American modern femininity and Eurocentric cosmopolitanism.

Book reviews of Christian Collet and Pei-Te Lien, eds., The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); and Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

This essay argues that Cha’s DICTEE trains the reader in strategic language games in order to resist bellicose identities. It engages contemporary studies of multilingual literature in the United States, challenging overly optimistic visions of an inclusive cosmopolitanism that elides problems of gender, race, class, and nation. Sau-ling Wong’s “Denationalization Reconsidered” is used to examine these issues in relation to defense funding, language policies, and historical tensions between ethnic studies and area studies in the US. As this essay posits, Cha addressed many of Wong’s concerns avant la lettre.

This essay discusses Nie Hualing’s novel Sangqing yu Taohong (Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China) as a literary text that intensely engages Chinese identity and Chineseness as a global, transnational cultural phenomenon, while at the same time narrating a story of migration to the US that spurs the emergence (within the text) of some of the most localized, politically charged concerns of Asian American cultural discourse. While the publication of Nie’s novel coincides with the initial articulations of Asian American identity in the context of political activism, Sangqing yu Taohong/Mulberry and Peach also anticipates the growing interest for contextualizing the Asian American experience as a transnational phenomenon. In its representation of Chinese migration to America and female sexuality as issues that stretch ethical and political boundaries and blur the distinction between private and public discourses, this novel constructs identity as both politicized and uncontainable, anticipating, again, some key components of Asian American cultural discourse since the 1990s. This excess of signification reproduces the tension between “model minorities” and “bad subjects” that makes Asian American discourse inescapably political. This political nature, in turn, intertwines public and private frameworks of reference, as well as ethnic, national, and transnational dimensions of signification.

In the context of the expanding discourse of transnational Asian American Studies, this essay studies Kimiko Hahn, particularly her engagement with East Asian traditions in her poetry, and shows how her work exemplifies a transcultural Asian American literature that requires reading beyond the domestic boundaries of the United States. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's and Gayatri Spivak’s translation studies, it examines how Hahn critiques the assimilationist representation of Asian women in translations of Asian texts such as Arthur Waley’s version of Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji. It then reads how, based on her thoughts about literary translation, Hahn experiments with creative practices of “translation,” including a retranslation of Ezra Pound’s Chinese images and untranslation of zuihitsu. Rewriting Ezra Pound’s Chinese images, Hahn reconstructs women’s voice in ancient Chinese writings. Undoing the simplistic interpretation of the classical Japanese form zuihitsu, her restorative untranslation of the form makes connections between the discursive agency of ancient Asian women writers and contemporary women poets. Thus, Hahn’s translational writing reveals a poetics of “continental drift,” a poetics that calls attention to the necessity of reading Asian American literature in transnational and transcultural contexts.

The pandemic has rearticulated racial discourses in unprecedented ways and at an accelerating pace. The resurgent protests of Black Lives Matter demand fundamental changes in the criminal (in)justice system and racial relations in the US beyond the Black–white dichotomy. In this paper, I argue that our current shared struggles require a new form of internationalism against the rapid right-wing turn of global hegemonies that does not draw lines between the simple binaries of “East vs. West,” “white vs. Black,” or “authoritarianism vs. democracy,” but in the interconnected fights against the militarized police state, neoliberal capitalist order, Han supremacy, and the continued impacts of Euro-American coloniality.

Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms is an extended comparison of US and Chinese multiculturalisms during the post–Cold War era. Her book situates itself at the intersection of Asian American literary critique and the growing field of comparative multiculturalism. Through readings of fictional narratives that address the issue of racial and ethnic difference in both national contexts simultaneously, the author models a “double critique” framework for US–Chinese comparative literary studies.The book approaches U.S. liberal multiculturalism and China’s ethnic policy as two competing multiculturalisms, one grounded primarily in a history of racial desegregation and the other in the legacies of a socialist revolution. Since the end of the Cold War, the two multiculturalisms have increasingly been brought into contact through translation and other forms of mediation. Pluralist Universalism demonstrates that a number of fictional narratives, including those commonly classified as Chinese, American, and Chinese American, have illuminated incongruities and connections between the ethno-racial politics of the two nations.The “double critique” framework builds upon critical perspectives developed in Asian American studies and adjacent fields. The book brings to life an innovative vision of Asian American literary critique, even as it offers a unique intervention in ideas of ethnicity and race prevailing in both China and the United States in the post–Cold War era.

Excerpted from Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

Excerpted from Stephen Hong Sohn, Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

This essay argues that Cha’s DICTEE trains the reader in strategic language games in order to resist bellicose identities. It engages contemporary studies of multilingual literature in the United States, challenging overly optimistic visions of an inclusive cosmopolitanism that elides problems of gender, race, class, and nation. Sau-ling Wong’s “Denationalization Reconsidered” is used to examine these issues in relation to defense funding, language policies, and historical tensions between ethnic studies and area studies in the US. As this essay posits, Cha addressed many of Wong’s concerns avant la lettre.

In 1953, Chiang Yee, a Chinese American travel writer and artist, began to write and exchange Chinese-language dayou poems with Yang Lien-sheng, a Harvard professor. These poems, seemingly casual, unrestrained, humorous, and sometimes emotional, reflected the sentiments of diaspora poets, their feelings about displacement, profession, language, and home. This article is a study of the cultural and literary significance of these dayou poems. Written during the Cold War era by Chinese scholars, they stand in sharp contrast with mainstream publications in both China and America. They are not merely an instance of Chinese poetic form being practiced overseas; when examined against their sociocultural context, these verses raise significant issues concerning displacement and homeland, career and cultural identity, and “mother tongue” and public expression. They reveal an ethos that diaspora poets have never publicly manifested in their English-language writings. Thus, a study of these dayou poems may deepen our understanding about Asian American literature, lead to a better appreciation of writing in languages other than English, and open up a new, exciting topic within Asian American Studies.

Book reviews of Christian Collet and Pei-Te Lien, eds., The Transnational Politics of Asian Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009); and Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

The 2008 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival presented three narrative films, Never Forever, Pretty to Think So, and West 32nd, with suggestively similar interests. Namely, all three films focus on “horizontal” (rather than intergenerational) conflicts between characters distinguished by class, legal status, and migration history but connected by ethnic or racial identifications. This article argues that the films, individually and collectively, participate in ongoing deliberations about the borders of Asian America by juxtaposing and organizing distinct models of conceiving Asian American identity. In particular, the films suggest the limitations of privileging certain formations of Asian America over others by both dramatizing and embodying their uneasy coexistence. Tensions between minority, immigrant, and diasporic positions become evident not only through their plots, characterizations, and stylistic elements but also in their complex production and distribution histories. The films together highlight the necessity of attending to the difficult questions of ethnic and racial identification and material inequity that are manifest when the various narratives of affiliation and difference espoused by each model encounter one another.

Caught having an affair while employed at the home of the governor-general of Saigon, Vietnamese cook, migrant worker, and narrator of Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, Binh, is cast out of his natal home, and sets off for the open sea, winding up as a live-in cook in the household of lesbian couple Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. As an abstract source of labor and culinary pleasure to those he encounters in Paris, Binh concludes, despondently, that he is, “nothing but a series of destinations with no meaningful expanses in between.” Yet the “expanses in between,” most notably in reference to waterways, allude to a central trope of Vietnamese culture. Incorporating Vietnamese symbolism with formative migratory experiences, this essay argues that Truong constructs a subject who can be read through both affective forms of national belonging as well as a broader queer diasporic community. It also explores Binh’s percipient tongue as one that is ever critical of the dynamics of power and privilege, and ever sensitive to the variances in salt (of sea, sweat, tears). The Book of Salt thus mediates the possibility of a gustatory epistemology and community constituted in the sensate, attuned to divergent experiences of mobility, labor, and love.

In the context of the expanding discourse of transnational Asian American Studies, this essay studies Kimiko Hahn, particularly her engagement with East Asian traditions in her poetry, and shows how her work exemplifies a transcultural Asian American literature that requires reading beyond the domestic boundaries of the United States. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's and Gayatri Spivak’s translation studies, it examines how Hahn critiques the assimilationist representation of Asian women in translations of Asian texts such as Arthur Waley’s version of Lady Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji. It then reads how, based on her thoughts about literary translation, Hahn experiments with creative practices of “translation,” including a retranslation of Ezra Pound’s Chinese images and untranslation of zuihitsu. Rewriting Ezra Pound’s Chinese images, Hahn reconstructs women’s voice in ancient Chinese writings. Undoing the simplistic interpretation of the classical Japanese form zuihitsu, her restorative untranslation of the form makes connections between the discursive agency of ancient Asian women writers and contemporary women poets. Thus, Hahn’s translational writing reveals a poetics of “continental drift,” a poetics that calls attention to the necessity of reading Asian American literature in transnational and transcultural contexts.

In the summer of 1928 in Berlin, the noted German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Chinese American actress Anna May Wong (1905–1961) shared an unlikely encounter that set in relief European and American conceptions of modernity as well as white European intellectual and American racial minority cosmopolitanisms. On July 6, 1928, Benjamin published the results as “Gespräch mit Anne May Wong” [“Speaking with Anna May Wong: A Chinoiserie from the Old West”] on the front page of the leading German literary review, Die Literarische Welt. Read against a cache of Wong’s writings, the encounter and the writings are significant for how they intervene in constructions of cosmopolitanism and racial and gendered difference. This encounter raises questions concerning the relationship between Asian America, modernity, race, gender, and cosmopolitanism, linking notions of cosmopolitanism to a discourse of race in the transnational American context. Benjamin’s struggles in fully characterizing Wong also point to the antagonism between racialized American modern femininity and Eurocentric cosmopolitanism.

In her recent work, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong draws critical attention to the implications of the formation of an Asian American “diaporic community” in cyberspace, where race still operates as an organizing principle of power relations. Although cyberspace is not confined by national borders, Wong examines how subversion of and intervention in race- and sex-based hierarchies in cyberspace can articulate Asian American identities in relation to diasporas and the nation-state. This essay explores the politics of artistic invention in diasporas as embedded in the disruption, dislocation, and fragmentation in Ming-Yuen S. Ma’s multi-media project, Xin Lu: A Travelogue in Four Parts—a series of four experimental videos about Chinese diasporas. It argues that by moving outside the nation-space into the experiential and virtual “global space” of diasporas, Ma’s work addresses Wong’s concerns and enacts a viable “virtual mediation” that situates Chinese diasporas in the historical contexts of British colonialism and American racial exploitation and exclusion. This movement also entails confronting other forms of oppression, including sexism and heterosexism in both the East and West. While giving voice and visibility to the struggles of racial and sexual minorities across national borders, Ma demonstrates the possibilities of a historicized critical approach to diasporas, one which underlies Wong’s insistence in critiquing gendered and racialized power structures both within and outside the nation-state.

This essay examines the relationships of performing bodies to elaborate “Asian/American corporeal citations” and argues that such citations create the grounds for a politics of mobility. Revisiting and extending Sau-ling Wong’s theoretical engagement with “myths of mobility,” it specifically uses the nexus of mourning, performance, and racialization to rearticulate modes of cultural passing by constructing a lineage through several men: screen star Toshiro Mifune, actor Lane Nishikawa (who invokes Mifune through Nishikawa’s elegiac solo piece Mifune and Me), and the author (disciplined through acting classes with Nishikawa). The stakes of re-membering are further articulated through the interweaving of the bodily acts associated with the death of the author’s grandfather, Bo Jung. Joining the principal argument with this more personal reflection is an attempt to think through the implications of Nishikawa’s theatrical memorial and to grapple with loss and the complex, nonlinear structures of memory that attend it. Ultimately, all the cultural transmissions discussed place the body at the center of transnational, racial, and ethnic discourses. In so doing, the essay revises kinship as the foundation for what might otherwise be too easily read as diasporic cultural productions.

This essay discusses Nie Hualing’s novel Sangqing yu Taohong (Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China) as a literary text that intensely engages Chinese identity and Chineseness as a global, transnational cultural phenomenon, while at the same time narrating a story of migration to the US that spurs the emergence (within the text) of some of the most localized, politically charged concerns of Asian American cultural discourse. While the publication of Nie’s novel coincides with the initial articulations of Asian American identity in the context of political activism, Sangqing yu Taohong/Mulberry and Peach also anticipates the growing interest for contextualizing the Asian American experience as a transnational phenomenon. In its representation of Chinese migration to America and female sexuality as issues that stretch ethical and political boundaries and blur the distinction between private and public discourses, this novel constructs identity as both politicized and uncontainable, anticipating, again, some key components of Asian American cultural discourse since the 1990s. This excess of signification reproduces the tension between “model minorities” and “bad subjects” that makes Asian American discourse inescapably political. This political nature, in turn, intertwines public and private frameworks of reference, as well as ethnic, national, and transnational dimensions of signification.

Gish Jen’s 2004 novel The Love Wife highlights the foreign presence within American national boundaries but plays with the reader’s expectations of a novel of immigration to deconstruct the categories of citizen and immigrant, foreigner and native, protagonist and antagonist, host and guest. This blurring between antagonist and protagonist in the novel captures the dynamics of hospitality: through a delicate series of adjustments, concessions, and compromise, guest and host can exchange places with one another. Tapping into fears particularly emergent in the post-9/11 era of immigrants as poised to infiltrate America, Jen’s novel engages with the anxiety evoked by the foreigner’s presence but complicates this notion through her careful examination of the ethnic- and gender-inflected dimensions of that response, as well as through the resolution of the plot. Considering the trope of hospitality within contemporary Asian American works also helps illuminate fiction’s role in evolving definitions of “Asian American” and “America” in the “post-national” era.

Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms is an extended comparison of US and Chinese multiculturalisms during the post–Cold War era. Her book situates itself at the intersection of Asian American literary critique and the growing field of comparative multiculturalism. Through readings of fictional narratives that address the issue of racial and ethnic difference in both national contexts simultaneously, the author models a “double critique” framework for US–Chinese comparative literary studies.The book approaches U.S. liberal multiculturalism and China’s ethnic policy as two competing multiculturalisms, one grounded primarily in a history of racial desegregation and the other in the legacies of a socialist revolution. Since the end of the Cold War, the two multiculturalisms have increasingly been brought into contact through translation and other forms of mediation. Pluralist Universalism demonstrates that a number of fictional narratives, including those commonly classified as Chinese, American, and Chinese American, have illuminated incongruities and connections between the ethno-racial politics of the two nations.The “double critique” framework builds upon critical perspectives developed in Asian American studies and adjacent fields. The book brings to life an innovative vision of Asian American literary critique, even as it offers a unique intervention in ideas of ethnicity and race prevailing in both China and the United States in the post–Cold War era.