Abstract
Even before opening its covers, there is something always already very familiar about a novel by an Asian American writer. Its reception from both popular and critical audiences is likely to be preceded by presumptions about its writer, its subject matter, its prose style, and, most significantly, the information it will provide about the culture and history of the particular Asian group with which the author is affiliated. For Asian American writers, the “text” that precedes them is the immigrant narrative, for the reigning assumption of the mainstream literary market is that works by Asian American writers are de facto immigrant narratives, whether or not immigration is the principal subject of the works. As a result, Asian American writing, fiction and nonfiction alike, has become a veritable genre with its own set of conventions, exemplifying what Fredric Jameson describes as texts that “come before us as the always-already-read” as well as the “always-already-written.”1 From the writer’s perspective, such audience assumptions and habits in turn translate into implicit but powerful imperatives that shape their narrative choices and strategies. Asian American writers, then, are subject to the demands of what I call the “autobiographic imperative,” an interpretive disposition of readers who habitually read fiction by ethnic writers as autobiography, as testimonies to lived experiences, typically assumed to be those of immigrants.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981): 9.
Gerald Graff, “Narrative and the Unofficial Interpretive Culture,” Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology, ed. James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989): 7.
John K. Young, Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2006): 155.
Shu-mei Shih, “Comparative Racialization: An Introduction,” PMLA 123.5 (October 2008): 1357.
Lev Grossman, “Who’s the Voice of This Generation?” Time, July 10, 2006 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1209947,00.html.
Nancy K. Miller, “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir,” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 539.
Julia Alvarez, “A Note on the Loosely Autobiographical,” New England Review 21.4 (Fall 2000): 165–166.
William Boelhower, “The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States,” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 125.
Thomas Ferraro, Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 1.
William Boelhower, Immigrant Autobiography in the United States: Four Versions of the Italian American Self (Verona, Italy: Essedue Edizioni, 1982): 32.
See Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach,” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 142–170.
For thorough discussions of Asian American writers’ appropriations and revisions of the generic characteristics of life writing, see Jinqi Ling, Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Rocio Davis and Sue-Im Lee, Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).
Patricia Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
Rocio Davis, Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007).
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990): 237.
Hayden White, “Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres,” New Literary History 34.3 (November 6, 2003): 601.
Arnold Rrupat, “Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self,” American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991): 171.
Adair Lara, “A Girl’s Flight to a Bright, Harsh Land.” Review of le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For. The San Francisco Chronicle, May 18, 2003. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/archive/2003/05/18/RV262885.DTL.
Chau Nguyen, “In Search of the Gangster,” Asia Pacific Arts, April 9, 2004. http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=9955.
Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen, “Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s ‘The Gangster We Are All Looking For’: The Ekphrastic Emigration of a Photographic,” Critique 48.1 (Fall 2006): 3–18.
David Mehegan, “Refuge in Her Writing,” Boston Globe, June 2, 2003. http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/153/living/Refuge_in_her_writing+.shtml.
Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994): ix.
William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Champaign-Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1986): 36. In his discussion of Andrews’s notion of “creative hearing,” Paul John Eakin goes on to say that such a reading—or hearing—would enable a recovery of “something of the nature of the identities of the oppressed, their own view of self and life story” (Eakin, “Introduction” 9).
Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (New York: Harvester Whaeatsheaf, 1993): 392.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6.2 (2006): 7–37.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977): 3.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Vain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003): 111.
Kenneth Quan, “Interview with Chang-rae Lee,” Asia Pacific Arts Magazine, UCLA Asia Institute, April 12, 2004. http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=11432
Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life (New York: Riverhead, 1999).
Nancy K. Miller, “But Enough about Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?” Tale Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000): 422.
Nora Okra Keller’s novel Comfort Woman, published in 1997, introduced the plight of these women to a mainstream American readership. In 2003, Congress introduced House Resolution 75.
Hamilton Carroll, “Traumatic Patriarchy: Reading Gendered Nationalisms in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life,” Modern Fiction Studies 51.3 (2005): 593.
See Rey Chow, “Keeping Them in Their Place: Coercive Mimeticism and Cross-Ethnic Representation,” The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002): 95–127.
Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003): 106.
Copyright information
© 2010 Betsy Huang
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Huang, B. (2010). Generic Sui Generis. In: Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117327_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117327_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29109-0
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11732-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)