Asian American Formations and the Literature of Late-Stage American Empire

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel brings together a set of musings on post-Cold War Asian American literature to explore the significance of late-stage American empire to Asian American studies. Critiques of US imperialism have been salient in Asian American studies since its inception in the 1960s and 70s during the anti-Vietnam War movement. Intensifying during the “transnational turn” of the 1990s and the surge of South Asian/Muslim/Arab American resistance after 9/11 and the “war on terror,” these critiques have generally focused on the international relations between an Asian country and the United States which were either rooted in territorial imperialism or influenced by US militarism and the relationship of the Pacific islands to the United States. Understandably, at the heart of these critiques is a dyadic relationship between the United States and an Asian country or API people. The panel suggests, though, that this dyadic focus in critiques of US imperialism can miss crucial elements of Asian American formations in a world after Pax Americana. It turns to examples of Asian American writers who imagine geographies of Asian migration and dispersal beyond the American metropole and Asian backwater, evade clean and fixed demarcations between victim and aggressor, and dwell on multiple, crisscrossing forces in Asian American formations. How does multipolarity as a critical term relate to multiplicity, heterogeneity, and hybridity, critical terms offered by Lisa Lowe often used in the 1990s? Does a focus on late-stage American empire and its manifold racial asymmetries yield insights on Asian American formations that a focus on transnationalism or globalization would not yield? What kind of literary imaginations on time and history accompany the geographical and spatial imagination of late-stage American empire? These are some of the questions the panel asks.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Multipolarity and Cold War Traces in Paul Yoon’s Fiction - Jeehyun Lim, University of Texas, Austin

• On Asian American Anti-Imperialist Critique - Martin J Ponce, The Ohio State University

• Racial Geographies, Narrative, and Ethnic Form in Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son - Christian Ravela, Arizona State University-Tempe

Chair

• Denise Cruz, Columbia University

Biographical Information

Jeehyun Lim is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Bilingual Brokers: Race, Literature, and Language as Human Capital (Fordham University Press, 2017). She is currently working on a book project that looks back on the legacy of the Korean War in American literature and culture, tentatively titled “Asian Life and the Cultural Legacy of the Korean War.”

Martin Joseph Ponce is an associate professor of English and the past director of the Sexuality Studies and Asian American Studies programs at Ohio State University. He received his doctorate and master’s in English from Rutgers University and his bachelor’s degree in English and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As a researcher and teacher of Asian American, African American, comparative U.S. ethnic/Indigenous, and queer of color literatures, he is the author of Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (2012) and co-editor of Samuel Steward and the Pursuit of the Erotic: Sexuality, Literature, Archives (2017). His articles have appeared in such journals as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, the Journal of Asian American Studies, and Modern Language Quarterly; and he has contributed essays to numerous Asian American, Filipinx, and queer studies anthologies. His current book projects include a queer retrospective analysis of the Asian American movement through contemporary literature, an examination of Japanese imperialism in Asian American literary history, and a comparative racial history of U.S. queer of color literatures.

Christian Ravela is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University. He specializes in Twentieth-Century US multiethnic literature, comparative ethnic studies, and critical theory. His work has been published in Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, Genre, 20th Century Literature, Cultural Critique, Lateral, and American Studies. He is a currently working on a book length project on late 20th century US multiethnic bildungsroman tentatively titled An Interethnic Wordliness: African American and Asian American Bildungsromans and the Negative Dialectic of Race.

Denise Cruz is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, with affiliations at the Institute for Sexuality and Gender and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity adn RAce. Her work covers a range of subjects, from connections between the rise of English literature and women’s suffrage in Manila, to the vibrant world of Filipino high fashion, to the strategies Asian American authors use to represent regional, national, and transnational communities. She is the author of Transpacific Femininities: the Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012), and the editor of an edition of Yay Panlilio’s The Crucible: An Autobiography of Colonel Yay, Filipina American Guerrilla. Her articles and essays have appeared in American Quarterly, PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, American Literary History, and the Journal of Asian American Studies; the edited collections Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia, Eating Asian America; and the Cambridge and Oxford companions to Asian American Literature. She has served as contributing editor for the Heath Anthology of American Literature. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Ford Foundation and a multi-year Insight grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.