This framing chapter focuses on the nation’s founding and the salience of inequality and race that is baked into our founding documents. It also discusses the concept of democracy that prevailed at the time of the founding and why it represented a radical departure from the past influences of Anglo and French political thought. It introduces the concept of multiple political traditions within American democracy.

This chapter asks how literature and literary criticism contribute to the understanding of Asian American racialization. It traces the emergence of the panethnic construct of Asian America as a radical exercise of global, anticolonial imagination, exploring how Asian Americans are racialized as intermediaries within the United States. Asian American literature captures the dynamism of this construct, Rana argues, drawing out an allegory for literary analysis from Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker. The tragic characterization of the novel’s protagonist – a spy cast as analyst – renders the model minority myth as mythos, reorienting its trajectory of assimilation and incorporation toward the broader interpretive totality of US militarism and empire. Asian American literature thus enables readers to trace the cocreative relationship between social formations and literary forms, to read not for the representation but for the refiguration of race.

At the turn of the century as the western frontier came to a close, America expanded its reach across the Pacific and in so doing solidified a burgeoning modern gay identity steeped in imaginations of the “Orient.” Pacific Islanders and Asian immigrants themselves in fact played a crucial role by illustrating a different way of being to western writers such as Joaquin Miller and Charles Warren Stoddard, even as they were appropriated in bohemians’ explorations of their own same-sex sexuality.

This chapter argues that queering concepts of literary type provides an approach for cultivating queer readings in the field of early Asian American literature that do not rely on recourse to a search for timeless queer identities. The chapter provides a prospective inventory of queer types within the field of early Asian American literature through readings across five nation/diaspora formations: the Philippines, Korea, Japan, India, and China, with special and initial focus on queer types in the political novel.

Stories of Asian immigration to North America have developed a series of recognizable tropes, from exile for economic or political reasons to arrival and the subsequent struggles of discrimination, assimilation, and self-identity. This chapter identifies the preferred themes of graphic novel publishers, who continue to seek and legitimize a familiar model of Asian American narrative: that of origin and identity stories, often autobiographical in nature, in which authors grapple with assimilation difficulties and express identity challenges, notably when self-acceptance and community acceptance are not always aligned (e.g., in celebrated works by Adrian Tomine and Gene Luen Yang). The chapter also considers other types of narratives: family stories in which a mixed heritage challenges social norms (Lynda Barry), graphic memoirs from second-generation Asian Americans on their immigrant mothers and their cultural transition, and refugee narratives from authors of the Vietnamese diaspora who reflect on the Vietnam War and the perilous immigration of “boat people.”

This chapter outlines “refugee ecology” as a concept through which to engage how refugees are depicted in relation to the environment. Focusing on portrayals of water, it compares recent media portrayals of refugees with refugee narratives to understand how maritime entities shape understandings of refugees. While more mainstream accounts often depict waterways as sites of danger from which refugees must be rescued, refugee narratives offer a wider array of aqueous representations. Examining Nam Le’s short story “The Boat” suggests that, for Vietnam War refugees, rivers, seas, and oceans are not simply merciless forces that threaten refugee life. Rather, they are also repositories of the dead, archives of memory, and spiritual forces that reflect intimate human–nonhuman ties and reveal Vietnam’s deep seafaring past. Interpreted through the lens of refugee ecology, “The Boat” reveals how mariner history and knowledge are critical to the survival and emergence of diasporas.

Asian Americans play a prominent role in the state surveillance story, because Asian Americans play an ambiguous role in both international relations and domestic race relations.4 Although people of Asian descent have been arriving in the Americas since before the Civil War – Asian soldiers fighting on both sides of the internecine conflict – Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants, whatever their formal status and however assimilated, have been portrayed as “sojourners” only temporarily resident in the United States and likely to return to a homeland to which they have remained stealthily loyal.5 The persistent theme has been that Asians are inassimilable into American society, whether by biology, culture, or their own collective choices. The assumption that it is contradictory to be both Asian and American has been used, explicitly and implicitly, to justify discrimination against Asian Americans.

Bad Day at Black Rock is a Western set just after the end of World War II. The desert town of Black Rock, teetering on the edges of both a failed frontier and postwar disillusionment, was once home to a Japanese American man named Komako. At Black Rock, Komako had found water where others had failed – and water is worth killing for. After murdering Komako and burying him beside his well, Black Rock masks the deed by claiming Komako had been “shipped off” to an incarceration camp during the war. Examining the layered machinations at play in Black Rock's lie, this chapter turns to earth: it reads the landscape as a vital surround through which Komako and the incarceration of Japanese Americans physically and hauntingly manifest at Black Rock. It links the Western and the West to narratives of Japanese American incarceration, both bound to the settler colonial impulse that seeks to consolidate US power and authority over land, water, and people in the West. Simultaneously indebted to ecocriticism and comparative race studies, this chapter explores the ways Black Rock’s Hollywood Western becomes an incarceration tale – which in turn becomes a narrative of settler colonial eco-imperialism.

Although Li-Young Lee frequently presents himself as a poet of the absolute, his work is often demonstrably driven by a substrate of anger.  Examining Lee’s first collection, Rose, this chapter shows how diasporic anger both influences Lee’s formal practices and shapes his self-understanding.  As I strive to suggest, the collection develops what might be called a poetics of failure, a way of making poetry out of the failure of poetry. This poetics enables Lee both to tap into and to contain diasporic anger, ultimately generating what I call diasporic irony – an exile’s version of the literary and philosophical tradition of romantic irony. In substantiating these claims, I hope not only to call attention to anger as a recurrent and generative feature of Asian American literary and cultural production, but also to contribute to the renewed attention to form in Asian American literary criticism. Often dismissed as merely content-based, Asian American poetry is in fact formally innovative, and its formal innovations have everything to do with the sociohistorical and political conditions of its emergence.

This chapter examines contemporary queer Asian American literature’s persistent and pervasive critiques of the Asian American family’s disciplining of nonnormative genders and sexualities, on the one hand, and mainstream LGBTQ formations’ anti-Asian racism, on the other. In tracking these dual modes of critique, the chapter suggests that the queer Asian American subject’s displacement from both model minority heteronormativity and queer liberal homonormativity implies that it cannot be enfolded into and conscripted to serve the ideology of US imperial sexual exceptionalism. In consequence, queer Asian American literature has had to imagine and lay claim to alternative forms of belonging, whether by documenting queer people of color spaces and socialities or by inserting queer presences into conventional Asian/American histories.

This chapter explores how debt shaped the Asian American subject, most notably through its creation of the model minority subject. It argues that debt, a fundamental aspect of neoliberalism, structured the racialization of Asian Americans; this facilitated the production of the model minority as the exemplary neoliberal subject, characterized by acceptance of human capitalization and independence from the public sector through “resilience.” Surveying Asian American literature from 1965 to 1996, this chapter examines the role that debt played in the historical patterns and processes of Asian migration to the United States that tied the racialization of Asian Americans to their economic contributions and value. Moving beyond the more explicit connections between migration and debt, the chapter illustrates how ideas of debt and indebtedness manifest and structure conceptions of nationalism in the Asian American subject and family; the ability to immigrate inherently incurs indebtedness to the nation as well as to one’s parents who chose to immigrate. Thus, the concept of filial piety is reframed, showing that it is not a result of ancestry, but a function of immigration to America.

This chapter engages with Asian American utopian narrative forms as a heuristic for naming the contradictory subjects, spaces, and temporalities that emerge from competing visions of emancipation in the post-1990s period. In the wake of cultural nationalisms of earlier decades, and in a moment of neoliberal utopianism that hailed the end of the Cold War as the “achievement” of universal “Western liberal democracy,” women of color feminists critiqued cultural nationalism and the neoliberal utopian pursuit of a knowable subject and endpoint. The project of the liberal individual subject, they illuminate, elides racialized, gendered, and sexual difference for emancipatory projects. Demanding alternative accounts of freedom, Asian American feminists called for “subjectless” and “collective” politics. This chapter explores how this theoretical shift coincides with Asian American writers underscoring the paradoxes of utopian forms, as producing logics of domination and freedom. Through Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex (2005) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel (2010), this chapter rethinks Aztlán and the I-Hotel as galvanizing utopian forces for the Chicano and Asian American movements. Rather than abandoning utopia, Yamashita and Foster offer the utopian as a contradictory space to challenge the nationalist essentialisms of minority movements and the market individualism of neoliberal capitalism.

Circa 2013, finding itself without a devoted physical exhibition space, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center adopted this unofficial philosophy: the soul of a twenty-first-century museum is not in the building itself but what goes inside it. With slight modification, that philosophy might apply readily to twenty-first-century Asian American literature: the soul of Asian American literature is not in the pages of a book - but neither does it reside solely in what goes on to those pages; instead, I propose, the soul is in the dynamic tension between the “content” and the means of delivery, a radically shifting set of possibilities in the twenty-first century. This chapter is a meditation on my work - as a curator with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and as the Director and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Asian American Literary Review - programming, editing, curating, publishing, projecting, and hammering and nailing Asian American literature, on the page and off, across a range of delivery vehicles. This chapter examines Asian American literature as a complex ecosystem, with writer, editor, publisher, readerships, scholars, and community organizers, among others, in dynamic interrelation. It argues for solidarity economy of the arts principles - more equitable distribution of resources; formation of cooperatives; shared commitments to intersecting forms of justice - as ways of both understanding and further growing Asian American literature.

The Vietnam War and the anti-war movement are oftentimes discussed as foundational in the formation of Asian American political consciousness and representation during the late 1960s and 1970s. However, Asian American literature of that time offers very little engagement with the war or the anti-war movement. This chapter offers an overview of representations of the Vietnam War in Asian American literature and examines the possible reasons for the sparse representations of the war. In doing so, this chapter turns to an archive of ephemera: radical Asian American periodicals that represented the Asian American movement, and the first Asian American readers and anthologies, Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971) and Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (1976).

A pan-Asian American poetry has been at the forefront of innovative poetics in myriad ways. This chapter foregrounds the impact the innovative legacies of the 1980s and 1990s have had on early twenty-first-century Asian American poetry. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed within Asian American letters the success of a mainstream lyricism but were also a crucial incubation period for a counter-tradition impatient with mainstream modes of poetic expression. Three major counter-modes have come to characterize some of the finest achievements of contemporary Asian American innovative poetics: a surrealist mode, pioneered by John Yau and practiced by younger poets such as Paolo Javier; a documental mode of postmodern montage, evident in the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Walter K. Lew, Myung Mi Kim, and Divya Victor; and a phenomenological mode practiced by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Sueyeun Juliette Lee.