Bilingual Brokers

Reviewed by: Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures Monica Chiu Sheng-mei Ma. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998. 188 pp. Recent debates in Asian American studies include issues regarding denationalizing the field, addressed by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, and monitoring the effects of globalization and an increased Asian American population, championed by Lisa Lowe. As such, immigrant and postcolonial subjectivities in Asian American and postcolonial studies would seem an applicable and important arena for scrutiny. However, Sheng-Mei Ma finds an inherent ideology in the field that fabricates immigrants as “others” and replicates stereotypes it purports to destroy; as well, Ma unveils entrenched western-centric views within postcolonial studies, those limiting Asian American and postcolonial scholars to an ironic European-postcolonial stance. His intriguing angles and their accompanying textual examples are a major contribution to radicalizing traditional views of immigrant subjectivities. The book’s first five chapters discuss how “Asian American discourse Orientalizes Asian immigrants and Occidentalizes white bodies.” Ma notes that those Southeast Asian immigrants who have been arriving on U.S. shores in great numbers since 1975 offer a rich field of information by which to glean biographies and other stories. However, he criticizes second- and third-generation story tellers—those who are often more linguistically apt to tell these immigrants’ tales—for creating characters who are “native informants” or who practice “ethnographic feminism.” The former, exemplified by Frank Chin and other editors of Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, foregrounds the “exoticism” they resent while simultaneously “empowering themselves in the midst of a white society through immigrant memories and the mythic Asian past.” Ma introduces “ethnographic feminism” through the often praised The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston. The protagonist’s mother, born in China before relocating to the U.S., becomes a “native informant” whose “fantastic” tales are effortlessly transcribed into a western feminist context. This feminism (which Ma regards as a gesture toward political correctness), combined with ethnography (read: orientalism), promotes, more than anything else, increased book sales. Ma names this orientalism among Chinese American authors a form of [End Page 542] “self-hatred,” wherein those who employ so-called effeminate Chinese male characters or who write in a so-called debased pidgin in order to defuse their negative cultural implications only reveal complicity in western orientalism. In other chapters of this section, Ma criticizes Asian American authors whose male characters eroticize white women’s bodies as a form of self-empowerment, and he explores two Taiwanese overseas student writers who produce schizophrenic immigrant characters, replicating and not dismantling the idea of the “unassimilable alien.” In his last three chapters, Ma investigates two types of Asian diaspora literature which illuminate immigrant subjectivities whose consciousness and focal point are Chinese- and not western-centric. Liu-hsueh-shen wen hsueh (“overseas student literature”) addresses topics such as characters’ exclusion from both Chinese and American cultural arenas and the impact, on Taiwan, of political movements and western theories (modernism or existentialism) in novels like Yu Li-hua’s Again the Palm Trees! and Chang Hsi-kuo’s Rage of Yesteryear. Ma finds that Hsiang-t’u we-hsueh (“home-soil or nativist literature” from Taiwan since the 1970s) critiques, first, the Chinese essence of the aforementioned overseas literature as well as westernization, particularly that generated by American Gls on leave who establish a “mushrooming sex trade” abroad. Ma inquires why postcolonial studies, with its emphasis on nonwestern, nonhegemonic practices, has relegated such literature that obviously encompasses postcolonial contexts to sinologists and Asian—not Asian American—departments. He answers by defining western postcolonial studies as “deeply Eurocentric”: it accentuates the European angle of British or French colonies, as does Edward Said for example; it ignores Asian-colonized territories; and it focuses on minority subjects in the so-called first world. He concludes that western academics’ “linguistic and cultural self-interests” unfortunately exclude overseas (mostly middle-class) Chinese writers, who provide rich material by which to study immigrant subjectivities. The most recent incarnation of overseas student literature, suggests Ma, is filmmaking. He concludes with provocative readings of Ang...

The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American by Min Hyoung Song Duke University Press, 2013. 284 pages Min Hyoung Song's The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American is a book of remarkable ambition. Unmatched in scope since Elaine Kim's 1982 study Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context and David Palumbo-Liu's broader 1999 history (which foregrounded literary forms), Asian/America: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, The Children of 1965, like its predecessors, offers a comprehensive assessment of important trends and critical concerns by a leading mind in the field, and charts a course for future inquiry. If we can imagine such a genre, it is a watershed book. It presents a wide view of Asian American literary production by writers who were born after the mid-1960s and began gaining prominence in the 1990s, contextualizing their texts within the broader traditions of both Asian American writing since the nineteenth century and Asian American critical thought since the late 1960s. While this task has become impossible to complete in the encyclopedic model that Kim's 1982 study adopted, given the explosion of literary production in the past few decades, what is notable here is the number and range of examples Song offers as part of his attempt to read as capaciously as possible. The widely divergent texts that Song chooses span multiple literary forms (including fiction, poetry, graphic novels) and genres (including memoir, science fiction, and avant-garde writing); he even includes an appendix that lists 101 contemporary Asian American literary texts as a recommended reading list. As comfortable with arcane literary forms as he is with ethnographic charts, Song deftly appropriates from a number of theoretical traditions, including queer theory, formalism, sociological historicism, and continental philosophy. Finally, an added bonus of Song's study is its integration of material from a series of interviews that Song conducted with prominent Asian American writers. Song, to his credit, treats these interviews not as oracular pronouncements, but as texts that require analysis and as opportunities to probe questions of racial identification that complicate the authors' statements. As capacious as its coverage of the field is, the book pitches its stakes on three, for the most part interwoven, levels: a historical argument about the specificity of literary production in the wake of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act; a theoretical argument about the rhizomatic logic of reterritorialization in contemporary Asian American literary production; and a plea for the continuing value of creative literature, often formulated in (vexed) formalist terms. As Song argues in the book's first chapter, which serves as a kind of second and perhaps more useful introduction, the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act had a profound effect on Asian American immigration patterns and subsequently created the particular conditions under which Asian American literary production flowered. Citing Harold Bloom's prediction that Asian Americans in the first few decades of the twenty-first century would succeed the children of Jewish immigrants as the driving force for a new phase in American literature, Song tracks the effects of the bill from the demographic shifts it put in motion to the literature that resulted. Before 1965, Asians in America, generally speaking, were mostly male, American born, concentrated on the west coast of the US with small pockets in other major urban centers, and part of an unseen underclass of laborers and service workers. After 1965, in addition to the dramatic increase of the Asian American population in general, Asians in America were more foreign born, diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity, geographically dispersed across the US, and upwardly mobile, with many serving in technobureaucratic capacities in fields like engineering, science, medicine, and computer technology. …

Asian American literature has its roots in the nineteenth century, and Asian American criticism and theory grew out of the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 70s. An extremely broad field, Asian American criticism examines literature by people of East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern descent. Since its beginnings, Asian American literary criticism and theory have engaged with feminism, Marxism, poststructuralism, queer theory, postcolonialism, and cultural studies in heterogeneous and productive ways.

Reconciling Asian-American Studies: Debt, Indebtedness, and Obligation Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (bio) Duong, Lan. 2012. Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. $79.50 hc. $27.95 sc. 264pp. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. 2012. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. $84.95 hc. $23.95 sc. xvi + 276 pp. Ninh, erin Khuê. 2011. Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature. New York: New York University Press. $75.00 hc. $24.00 sc. vii + 207 pp. Etymologically drawn from the Latin term for “something owed” (debitum), “debt” strikes a decidedly familiar chord at the turn of the twenty-first century. Set alongside contemporary banking crises, financial meltdowns, and governmental bailouts, “debt” coheres with economically driven characterizations of cooperative culpability (particularly with regard to state regulation) and individual responsibility (e.g., subprime loans). Simultaneously, the condition of being in debt—“indebtedness”—can refer to monetary liability or assume a more personal register, signaling an affective obligation to another party or entity. This ancillary definition, in which pecuniary metaphor remains interchangeable with emotional bond, semantically coexists with “gratitude,” in which one is—by way of gift or favor—beholden to another. Notwithstanding divergent resonances and differential registers, “debt,” “indebtedness,” “gratitude,” and “obligation” are [End Page 182] relational terms that underscore associations between and among individuals and groups. This collective reading of “debt” fits the parameters of Asian-American studies as a now-established multidisciplinary field that was, from the outset, indebted to mid-century civil rights movements. Indeed, such movements vociferously and urgently emphasized the politicized obligation to reclaim and uncover histories of racialized oppression. The first generation of Asian Americanists recovered stories of immigration exclusion (for example, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act), racist incarceration (e.g., the Japanese-American internment), citizenship restriction (as exemplified by the 1922 naturalization case Ozawa v. United States), and political disenfranchisement. The field also owes—immediately and belatedly—a vexed debt to US foreign policy and shifts in immigration law. With regard to the former, twentieth-century American history lays bare longstanding engagements with and in Asia, emblematized by militarized interventions and occupations in the Philippines (1898–1946), Japan (1945–52), Korea (1950–53), and Southeast Asia (1959–75). In terms of the latter, the passage of the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act (which eschewed nation-state immigration quotas in favor of East-West hemispheric designations) and subsequent refugee acts (in 1975 and 1980 respectively) enabled the first en masse migration of Asian immigrants to the United States. These histories, which to varying degrees brought Asian-American studies into being, operate as identifiable anchors for three recently published monographs: erin Khuê Ninh’s Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (2011), Lan Duong’s Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (2012), and Mimi Thi Nguyen’s The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (2012). Accessible to multiple audiences (including undergraduates, graduate students, and specialists), each work makes a considerable and commendable contribution to the interdisciplinary fields of Asian-American literary studies, Southeast Asian–American studies, and American cultural studies. In so doing, these projects highlight not only where such fields have been but also evocatively highlight where they are and should be going. To be sure, integral to Ingratitude, Treacherous Subjects, and The Gift of Freedom is a nuanced consideration of debt, indebtedness, and obligation. These theoretical evaluations—rooted in heterogeneous archives and manifest in variegated reading practices—productively render visible a flexible, debt-driven analytic that re-visions and recalibrates racialized legacies of immigration and war. As the full title of Ninh’s monograph suggests, Ingratitude concentrates its affective and intellectual attention on the second-generation “debt-bound daughter” in Asian-American literature. Whereas Ingratitude focuses its narrative attention on the invested filial obligations between immigrant parents and their female children, Duong’s Treacherous Subjects evaluates—via film and literature—the indebted intersectional relationship between race, gender, and nation. Guided by contradictory characterizations of Vietnamese subjects (including “over here” [End Page 183] refugees and “over there” nationals) as “collaborators” and “traitors” during and after the American War in Vietnam, Treacherous Subjects provocatively recalibrates the...

The goal of narratology is to construct models or statements that apply universally to narratives as such, or to recognized types of narrative, defined primarily through formal characteristics. In contrast, Asian American literature is defined by reference to a social group with a concrete historical existence. Though the two enterprises may seem to have little in common, their rapprochement can be productive. Categories from both classical narrative theory as well as more recent cognitive narratology can help identify and compare important features of Asian American narratives. Conversely, Asian American literature shows how narratology can build on the knowledge that narrative is a social practice, and that its formal analysis requires the consideration of power, kinship, diaspora, and racial embodiment, as well as gender. For example, the relation between the narrator and narratee plays a major role in canonical works of Asian American literature; narratological analysis benefits from examining how this relation is shaped by generational and spatial dislocation, as well as claims to referential truth.

This essay identifies a need for a postvisible definition of Asian American literature. Traditionally Asian American literature has been identified by the racial descent of the writer and recognizable “Asian American” content, but such qualifications are no longer sufficient and prompt the question, “But is it Asian American?” In order to theorize a postvisible definition, this essay engages twentieth-century philosophy of art to delineate three distinct approaches to definition in Asian American literary history: a “real” definition in its founding period that pursued exactitude and empiricism in substantiating a new category of art called Asian American literature, to an anti-definition in the 1990s, and to the pluralist, nonnormative definition since 2000 in which identifying a text as Asian American is an exercise in persuasively situating the text within the Asian American literary artworld, not in identifying visibly “detectible” properties.

The contested category of Asian American literature presents a rich opportunity to explore questions of epistemology. At the start of the 21st century, a formal turn in literary study further illuminates shifts in structures of knowledge and ways of knowing. Asian American literature emerged in the 1970s as a critical response to a history of exclusion and misrepresentation. As the field established itself, literary knowledge was defined quite narrowly: it is produced by Asian Americans and the subject of knowledge is Asian America itself. The reading practices that arise from this central paradigm have been called “instrumental” or “sociological,” insofar as they conceive of literary language, with varying degrees of formal interest, as an instrument or expression of Asian America. From the 2000s onward, scholarship on Asian American form and poetics has grown steadily, and what distinguishes this particular movement is its privileging of form as its primary object of investigation. Correspondingly the subject of knowledge also shifts from Asian America as the default referent to Asian American literature and the literary tradition. Critics note that one consequence of making form the prime objective is a potential tendency to drift away from the ambit of Asian America altogether. Those literary texts featuring conspicuous formal experimentation have garnered a lot of attention; less has been paid to the early texts, like the anthology Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), where formal concerns are not as explicit. Yet upon closer examination of Aiiieeeee! one discovers another type of figurative activity that can help redefine Asian American literary knowledge, offering us new ways of reading and looking at race.

This volume is devoted to Asian American Literature between 1930 to 1965, a period of immense social, historical, and cultural transformations that continue to shape the conditions of our world. From the Great Depression to the Second World War to the Civil Rights Movement to landmark immigrations reforms, Asian American literature provides unique and insightful perspectives on these historical developments, all while creatively engaging with globally-dispersed decolonization movements. Each chapter, written a by leading figures in their fields, demonstrates how Asian American writing affectingly reveals our complex world and its contested pasts. Case studies of major authors of this era show this as a time when the figure of the Asian American author became newly significant. This volume provides historical grounding, theoretical interventions, and nuanced textual analysis of Asian American literature in this period.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison forcefully reveals how American literature’s representational terrain can be understood through the history of enslavement and oppression. Her paradigm is not only political; she also advances an innovative interpretive approach to American literature, encouraging us to take a closer look at racialized minor characters. An intellectual investment in the minor character helps generate comparative race critiques that expand how American literatures can be analyzed. Along these lines, this article focuses on a particular inclusion of a minor character, an Asian American female, within a Chicano literary production.1 In order to illuminate the importance of what we might call minority Orientalism, I explore the ways in which Alejandro Morales Wgures the futuristic Asian American subject within his speculative novel, The Rag Doll Plagues (1992).2 Although this article focuses on one book, my critical methodology and theorization can be applied much more broadly. An interpretation of minority Orientalist texts spotlights the Wgure of the Asian or Asian American as a minor character who functions to clarify the comparative and asymmetrical nature of racial exclusions. Some questions to consider: What is particularly unique about Chi cano literary Orientalism? Why do Chicano writers seem collectively invested in employing Asian and Asian American characters and con texts to Xesh out the Wctional world? Such questions can be unpacked by thinking interracially and interethnically: Chicanos and Asian Americans are two populations that have been linked historically through citizenship status, class, labor exploitation, and regional habitation. At various points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the American

Southeast Asian American literature, once seen as emergent and marginal, has undergone a proliferation of creative and critical production over the last two decades. Nonetheless, the corpus remains undertheorized as a discrete field of study and is typically analyzed in terms of war and refugee narratives by Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong writers. This article argues for an expanded definition that encompasses works by authors with heritage of a wider Southeast Asian region, including Filipino, Indonesian, Malaysian, Singaporean, Burmese, and Thai American writing. In reviewing English-language prose (mainly fiction) published to date, this article presents a brief overview of historical and ongoing trends in the developing canon. It finds abiding concerns with shared global histories of European colonialism and Cold War imperialism; a border-crossing approach to postcolonial nation-states; and variances in the phenomenon of racialization and Asian American panethnicity within a transnational frame. The study of Southeast Asian American literature, especially when it considers the experiences of different groups more comparatively, illuminates a subjecthood marked by multiplicity and points to a distinct cultural and political strain within Asian American and US literature.

Seminal essays on Korean American writers were published in Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. But Asian American literary studies has been flourishing only from the 1990s thanks to Korean scholars' interest in overseas Korean literatures, the centennial of Korean immigration to the US in 2003, and the rise of Asian American literary studies in the US. An analysis of the articles and book-length studies shows the general trends of Asian American literary studies in Korea: Korean scholars are interested more in close readings of individual texts than in general, intraethnic, interethnic, and interracial studies; they prefer narratives to plays and poems; they focus on Korean American literature; they study not only Anglophone Korean American literature but also Korean-language American texts. Korean scholars' focus on Korean American literature significantly points at new directions in Asian American literary studies—towards broader, comparative, transnational, and translingual readings of Asian American texts. In conclusion, Korean scholars have actively participated in the international discursive networks of scholars interested in Asian American literature with their uniquely Korean perspectives.

Reviewed by: Bilingual Brokers: Race, Literature, and Language as Human Capital by Jeehyun Lim Kimberly McKee (bio) Bilingual Brokers: Race, Literature, and Language as Human Capital, by Jeehyun Lim. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. 270 pp. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 978–0–8232–7531–1. American anxieties concerning the English language and non-English-speaking individuals in the United States are central to how everyday Americans understand English as a marker of belonging to the nation. Jeehyun Lim critically engages questions of belonging, authenticity, and assimilation in her exploration of Asian American and Latino writings and mediation on language. Bilingual Brokers: Race, Literature, and Language as Human Capital presents a nuanced discussion of the shift from monolingualism to bilingualism in the United States, tracing the tensions produced by bilingual speakers as simultaneously possessing human and cultural capital as well as embodying the alien and foreign. Bilingual Brokers underscores bilingualism’s increased value as the stigma toward it waned in favor of locating its significance in a capitalist society. Lim demonstrates how the neoliberal nation-state incorporates bilingual speakers. As a broker, bilingual speakers serve as an interlocutor between multiple worlds and languages, interpreting and mediating the nuances in between. This brokering relies on the racialized capital related to what Lim terms possessive individualism. For Lim, possessive individualism demonstrates the limits and possibilities that exist for Asian Americans and Latinos in the liberal economy. This framework accounts for the racialization undergone by Asian Americans and Latinos whereby they are positioned as alien to the nation, and how this affects writers’ relationships to American literature. Centering Asian American and Latino writings as American, Bilingual Brokers elucidates the racialization authors undergo as national aliens and how they experience what Lim calls flexible incorporation. Beginning with an examination of Younghill Kang (The Grass Roof, 1931; East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee, 1937) and Carlos Buloson (America Is in the Heart, 1943) in chapter 1, Lim looks toward how Orientalism provides an avenue for these authors to enact “acceptable Asian identities at the time of Asian exclusion” (34). This is not to say the authors readily embrace Orientalism nor experience [End Page 486] it similarly; rather, they negotiate this positioning against what it means to be an Asian writer of American literature. Both Kang and Buloson serve as brokers translating their homelands and cultural traditions to readers in the West. They carefully negotiate their positions during a time of legal exclusion that have allowed for selective cultural inclusion. Chapters 2 and 3 raise questions concerning inclusivity and diversity in an exploration of public bilingualism in policy debates and the bicultural coming-of-age narratives of Américo Paredes (George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel, 1990) and Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior, 1976). Lim traces racial liberalism, cultural pluralism, and multiculturalism to better understand how they “inform the cultural views on public bilingualism” (64). Public bilingualism focused on the human capital of language and its intersections with cultural pluralism. Paying close attention to the intersections of language and education under racial liberalism, Bilingual Brokers exposes the limitations of assertions that English is a colorblind language in tracing the federal and state debates on bilingual education following the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. These debates were also impacted by Cold War nationalism’s entreaties for foreign language acquisition. Possessive individualism accounts for the inclusion of bilingual personhood in the American dream. In her last two chapters, Lim calls attention to the shift in bilingualism’s value from personal deficit to an object of desire in the neoliberal world, where global English is on the rise. This evolution in bilingualism’s acceptance coincides with the existence of dormant bilingualism, whereby bilingualism goes unacknowledged until it becomes an asset. Engaging jurisprudence to trace public bilingualism, Lim draws on the arguments of bilingual plaintiffs in her reading of Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1982). She examines how the intersections of the Spanish language and socioeconomic class result in different social capital and value being bestowed on Spanish speakers. This discussion of bilingualism shifts from considering a language’s worth to understanding its commodification as capital in her interrogation...

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African American and Asian American Literatures/1896-1937 Julia H. Lee. New York: New York University Press, 2011.How do you identify yourself as American in a period that enacts exclusion acts that deny you access to full citizenship? What is your status as a racialized being when the foundational narrative of your nation is roiled with anxieties surrounding racial difference? What are some strategies that racial minorities might deploy in negotiating and securing a space inside what historically has been a markedly protean and exclusionary national identity? Moreover, how are these themes explored and reproduced in the literature of the period in which they occur? These are only some of the fascinating questions that Julia Lee explores in Interradal Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African American and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937.In her book, Lee notes that at the beginning of the twentieth century, pairings of blacks and Asians were pervasive and frequently deployed, in a wide variety of discourses, to accommodate an evolving narrative on race and national identity. The use of Asian characters in African American novels in this period, like the use of black characters in Asian novels, were natural outgrowths of this practice. The authors of the texts cited in Lee's study used these pairings to generate narratives that were rich and divergent not only in the ways they engaged the question of racial identity but also in the ways in which they explored political alliances across racial divides. Lee notes that, because of the pervasiveness of these pairings of blacks and Asians in cultural texts from fields as widely divergent as history, the law, and science, identity for each group was deeply imbricated in comprehending the other. Because the popular discourse of the day linked them, both blacks and Asians had to take into account the other when conceptualizing their respective communities.Lee focuses her primary attention on seven works from the period 1896-1937. As she makes clear, each of these texts, in interrogating questions of race and exclusion, simultaneously performs other important cultural work. Some of these texts, like Charles Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition, drew on actual historical events. In Marrow, Chesnutt not only reenacts the event that led to the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson-the denial of access to a white car by a black passenger-he also adds a twist by introducing a Chinese laborer into the equation. …

Marilyn Chin's Revenge:Rewriting the Racial Shadow Alison Graham-Bertolini (bio) In Reading Asian American Literature (1993), Sauling Cynthia Wong identifies the trope of the Asian American racial shadow, explaining that a shadow character is frequently included in Asian American fiction as a way for "host characters" to project unwanted racialized aspects of themselves onto a character who is secondary to them (78). Wong explains, "By projecting undesirable 'Asianness' outward onto a double—what I term a racial shadow—one renders alien what is, in fact, literally inalienable, thereby disowning and distancing it" (78). Wong observes, "[T]here are a convincing number of episodes or stories in Asian American literature that embody this recurrent pattern of the double: a highly assimilated American-born Asian is troubled by a version of himself/herself that serves as a reminder of disowned Asian descent. The racial shadow draws out mixed feelings of revulsion and sympathy from the protagonist, usually compelling a painful reassessment of the behavioral code that has thus far appeared to augur full acceptance into American society" (92). As a result, the racial shadow (also known in its many other manifestations as the double, Doppelganger, second-self, anti-self, or alter ego), while initially the recipient of protagonists' unwanted traits, as well as their disdain, eventually helps protagonists accept [End Page 17] the "ethnic" aspects of themselves during a process of assimilation, leaving them somehow "better" or more evolved than at the beginning of the story.1 This outcome is problematic because it can imply that the unassimilated Asian American is partial, fractional, or incomplete, waiting to be bettered by the process of assimilation. Marilyn Chin, in her 2009 novel Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen: A Manifesto in 41 Tales, introduces a vastly different conversation about ethnic assimilation. The text upsets the trope of the Asian American racial shadow with its strident wit, irony, and unique architecture. In doing so, it conveys the importance of contemporary interethnicity, defined herein as the close interaction of multiple racial groups. Just as the twin protagonists reject binaries of racial categorization, the content, tone, and structure of Chin's novel also challenge typical narrative formulae. The continual halts and ruptures of the storyline not only break up predictable sequencing but also demonstrate how the open-ended tales can foster multiple avenues of connection and alliance for the characters themselves. In addition, numerous incarnations of the twins, subversive wit, and the inclusion of a variety of written genres tangibly demonstrate how gender and ethnicity are constantly created and recreated, just as narrative form produces ever-evolving combinations and rerenderings of knowledge. Chin is knowledgeable of the vast history and scope of the archetype of the racial shadow, as is evident in a 2012 interview in which she confirms the double consciousness of her twin characters: Twins are part of the double consciousness expressed by [W. E. B.] Du Bois. The dominant world can never understand them. Goodness, they have their own languages and inscapes. They're the unity of opposites: the yin-yang, parity-duality—Chinese fearful symmetry: double the happiness, double the fun; double the hated mouths to feed in a poor family. They are two sides of the integral self. ("Interview with Marilyn Chin" 217) Chin describes her twins as a "unity of opposites." Thus, unlike predecessor texts featuring the Asian American racial shadow in conflict with itself, Chin commandeers and rewrites the form to situate her protagonists as complementary subjects, celebrating the twins' individual plurality and thus [End Page 18] contesting constrictive binary identities such as "traditional"– "modern" or "model minority"–"bad subject." Dorothy J. Wang makes a similar argument about the "multivoiced irony" in Chin's poetry. She writes, "The female speakers of Chin's poems often occupy more than one ideological position and tonal register; their ironic voices, thus, cannot be analyzed … as a binary between a stated 'false' meaning and an unstated 'true message' (116). Wang continues, "Chin's use of irony does not set up simple either-or formulations or oppositions—of 'Chinese' or 'American,' of Chinese American female victim versus Chinese male oppressor, of Chinese American female victim versus white male oppressor, and so on" (116–17...

I will outnumber you. I will outbillion you. I am the spectacle in the forest. I am the inventor of rubber. I will outrubber you. Sir, the reality of your world is nothing more than a rotten caricature of great opera. --Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo In 1927, Henry Ford bought approximately 2.5 million acres of Amazon rainforest in the northern state of Para, Brazil, where he established a sizeable rubber plantation. (1) strived to be an all-inclusive, neocolonial system, extending the plantation infrastructure beyond sawmills and processing plants to include US-style hospitals, schools, white clapboard houses, and even recreational facilities such as a motion-picture theater and an eighteen-hole golf course. As documented in the company's archives, the Ford rubber plantations in Brazil worked to fulfill a Fordist fantasy of bringing modernity and to the almost impenetrable tropical jungle. (2) In her speculative fiction Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), Asian American writer Karen Tei Yamashita excavates this largely forgotten scene of US imperialism in Brazil and extrapolates from such imperial legacies what might happen to the Amazon when a valuable, rubbery, and possibly alien resource is unearthed during an age of global restructuring. In Through the Arc, disavowed imperial legacies such as Fordlandia resurface in mutated forms that haunt Yamashita's near-future speculations. By unearthing these buried histories, I place Through the Arc's historical extrapolations in critical dialogue with a long line of science that have worked on behalf of European and US empire-building to render the resource-rich jungle available for imperial conquest and expansion. Through the Arc intervenes in and disrupts imperialist fantasies of an uninhabited and virginal jungle, unruly, in need of outside regulation, and ripe and available for development. While speculative narratives about the tropics have often served projects that capitalize on the alienation and exoticization of indigenous peoples, I suggest that Yamashita offers her own speculations on the Brazilian Amazon to quite different ends. At once a cautionary tale of deforestation, exploitative labor practices, and abusive extraction of natural resources on the part of an avaricious first-world capitalist machine, Through the Arc critiques the historical amnesia that often accompanies progress narratives and what Maria-Josefina Saldana-Portillo has called fictions of development (752). Set in the rainforests of Brazil and featuring a Japanese Brazilian protagonist, Through the Arc recently garnered attention from Asian American scholars looking to complicate the US national formation of Asian American Studies. (3) In her reading of Through the Arc, Rachel Lee highlights how Yamashita's work broadens definitions of Asian to include Asian diasporas to Latin America (Americas 121). Lamenting the book's characterization by reviewers as magical realist, satirical, and futuristic, but never a work of Asian American literature, Lee asserts that Through the Arc is in fact an Asian American text, future-fitted for a post-nationalist conceptualization of Asian (113). In this essay, I emphasize the importance of reading Yamashita's work not only as Asian American literature, but also as science fiction--or, more accurately, as what writer and critic Nalo Hopkinson has termed science fiction. (4) Distinguishing their own work from science fiction's frequent fascination with exploration, conquest, and strange encounters, Hopkinson and Yamashita both take interest in telling stories that take the meme of colonizing the natives and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique it (Hopkinson 9). Extrapolated from lived experiences of alienation, abduction, and space and time travel, postcolonial science fiction such as Yamashita's Through the Arc formulates near-futures that call attention to imperial legacies of exclusion, exploitation, and displacement. …