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Article Excerpt
WHAT ARE THE VARIOUS FIGURATIONS of relating the fields of Asian American studies and women's studies/feminist studies? Beyond certain obvious points of commonality and overlap, such as studies of Asian American women and analytical concepts like intersectionality, what are the possibilities for thinking across these knowledge formations? The very naming of the two studies around identity categories has entailed a repeated narration of their founding moments as inhabited by certain foundational subjects named "Asian Americans" and "women." The persistent staging of feminism as a gendered problem in Asian American studies and the parallel staging of racial difference as a problem in women's studies have further reified a sense of their distinctive and sometimes antagonistic boundaries. Rather than an affectively charged compulsion to recognize and include Asian American women in women's studies, I propose a feminist studies of Asian American literary/cultural studies as an effort to think about the meanings, forms, and practices of interdisciplinarity within and across the two fields.
The rubric of "Asian American literary/cultural studies" points to several overlapping strands of disciplinary, multidisciplinary, and interdisciplinary scholarship. Beginning with Elaine H. Kim's 1982 book, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, what might be identified as Asian American literary studies has exceeded the ethnic and disciplinary boundaries announced in the term--literary texts depicting the histories and lives of an identifiable grouping of persons called Asian Americans and/or written by authors belonging to such a constituency. A central focus in critical framings of Asian American literary production has been the interrogation of the various layers of difference and contradiction that constitute the category Asian American itself. This has necessarily included considerations of the different yet linked histories of Asian racialization in the United States and U.S. imperialist forays into specific Asian countries. More recently, the pan-ethnic and mono-racial frame of earlier studies has both narrowed to examine single ethnic groups and widened for a more cross-racial and multiracial examination of particular Asian American-authored texts such as "women of color feminism." (1) Asian American has also been displaced and replaced by other configurations of identification, belonging, and disidentification including Pacific Islander, Nuyorasian, and queer diasporas. Many studies examine literary texts alongside and against other cultural representations in visual art, theater, film, and fashion. Both Kim's 1982 study and Lisa Lowe's 1996 monograph, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, are influential models of studying literature as part of struggles over representation and knowledge production within a broader problematic of American culture.
The slash between literary and cultural studies then points to the ways in which, in the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, these two categories have become conjoined to signify certain kinds of single-disciplinary scholarship and a certain kind of multidisciplinarity within interdisciplinarity. The four categories of the annual book awards presented by the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) can be taken as one measure of disciplinary demarcations within Asian American studies: History, Social Sciences, Prose/Fiction, and Cultural Studies. Although history and social sciences were once conjoined and then separated beginning in 2003, the category of cultural studies has had a more jagged history of differentiation from, alignment with, and subsumption of the literary. The separate designations of Literature and Cultural Studies in 1996 and 1997 changed to the genre-specific divisions of Fiction, Prose, and a conjoined critical scholarly category of the Cultural Studies and Literary Award in 1998. After a hiatus following the controversial conferral and rescinding of the 1999 Fiction award to Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Blu's Hanging, the AAAS book awards returned in 2001 with the Literary jettisoned once again for the Cultural Studies designation. Cultural studies has thus taken on a disciplinarily flexible and capacious charge within the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies alongside and against a more disciplined history and a more empirically charged social sciences. Although some of the recognized books do study Asian American literature, what is noteworthy is the expansion of the category to include art history, visual studies, and even some ethnographic studies that could be categorized under social sciences.
This incorporation of literature into the multidisciplinary rubric of cultural studies must be considered alongside and against a significant body of scholarship that reinforces Asian American literature as a securely legible object within the disciplinary specific space of literary studies and English. Here, I would point to two different projects, one focused on highlighting the formal, stylistic, and aesthetic qualities of Asian American literature and another focused on certain authors. It has now become commonplace to refer to a field called Asian American literary studies as a field of specialization in literary studies and to deploy Asian Americanist as a marker of professional (self-)identification analogous to and also part of Americanist or Anglophone specializations.
The rubric Asian American literary/cultural studies also points to how the three texts I will discuss can be situated as part of a growing body of works that investigate the relationship of Asian American studies not just to the established disciplines but to other interdisciplinary fields such as Asian studies, critical legal studies, and transnational studies (Chuh); women's studies, visual studies, and American studies (Creef); and queer studies, diaspora studies, South Asian studies, and postcolonial studies (Gopinath). Rather than any linear progression from marginal interdiscipline to established discipline or an expansion from a single discipline to multiple disciplines, these texts demonstrate how varying modes of critical knowledge production are configured differently by three different projects for differing analytical and political purposes. Each project deftly traces the contours of three different "impossible subjects"--Asian American, Japanese American, and queer South Asian diasporic female--and how they have not been and cannot be contained within a single nation-space of belonging or historical narrative of becoming. Rather, despite their geographical inflection, Asian America, Japanese America, and queer South Asian diaspora are illuminated in each book as dense archives of cultural, discursive, and epistemological struggle rather than sites of origin and identity.
Kandice Chuh's Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique offers the most explicit and sustained interrogation of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in Asian American studies. Under the subheading of "deconstructing 'Asian American,'" Chuh asks: "What does it mean to be a practitioner of Asian American studies when the anchoring terms--'Asian' and 'American'--seem so fatally unstable?" (4). At first glance, the organization of her chapters appears to reproduce a common convention of composing-by-disaggregating Asian American into several ethnic and national subgroups: Filipina/o American, Japanese American, and Korean American. However, as Chuh argues in the introduction, this very gesture itself belies the contested and contestable composition of both presumed whole and separable parts: "Attempts to resolve fragmentation by pluralizing its designated referents ... while successful in indicating...
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