Chinese American Literature

The author is preoccupied with how the sense of the nation is disseminated through the practice of reading and writing, and he argues that Asian American literature is a productive discursive negotiation of the contemporary contradiction in American citizenship. By analyzing the textual strategies with which literary Asian America is represented, the book shows how the "fictive ethnicity" of the nation continues to exert its regulatory power and suggests how we can work toward a radical American democratic consent.

Through nuanced readings of exemplary texts, the author delineates how Asian American literary production has become a site for the creation of Asian American subjects and community. The texts range from Kingston's enigmatic Tripmaster Monkey to the seductive cunning of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club; from Bharati Mukherjee's romantic Jasmine to the geocultural ambivalence of David Mure's Turning Japanese; and from the transvestic subversion of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly to the transpirational tropes of David Wong Louie's Pangs of Love.

Imagining the Nation integrates a fine appreciation of the formal features of Asian American literature with the conflict andconvergence among different reading communities and the dilemma of ethnic intellectuals caught in the process of their institutionalization. By articulating Asian American structures of feeling across the nexus of East and Wes

Chu further demonstrates that Asian American male and female writers engage different strategies in the struggle to adapt, reflecting their particular, gender-based relationships to immigration, work, and cultural representation. While offering fresh perspectives on the well-known writings -- both fiction and memoir -- of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Bharati Mukherjee, Frank Chin, and David Mura, Assimilating Asians also provides new insight into the work of less recognized but nevertheless important writers like Carlos Bulosan, Edith Eaton, Younghill Kang, Milton Murayama, and John Okada. As she explores this expansive range of texts -- published over the course of the last century by authors of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Indian origin or descent -- Chu is able to illuminate her argument by linking it to key historical and cultural events.

Assimilating Asians makes animportant contribution to the fields of Asian American, American, and women's studies. Scholars of Asian American literature and culture, as well as of ethnicity and assimilation, will find particular interest and value in this

"Rachel Lee has opened an important new chapter in the study of Asian American literature. Her trans-Pacific and trans-hemispheric conception of the 'Americas' of Asian American culture, combined with her scrupulous theorizing of gender, provides a fresh, original approach to the field. In doing so, she also maps out the criticism of the future and boldly enlarges the meaning of American literature."--Eric Sundquist, Northwestern University