Long Le-Khac

Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

"Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America tells the story of the making of a shared Latinx and Asian America over the past fifty years. Historically this solidarity has been difficult to see because Asian and Latinx immigrants have often been described in opposing terms of desirability (model minority versus "illegal" immigrant). However, by looking at similarities in Latinx and Asian American literatures, Long Le-Khac reveals their entangled histories and the ways in which these groups have formed in relation to one another"--

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 264
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. März 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 231mm x 155mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 544g
• ISBN-13: 9781503611467
• ISBN-10: 1503611469
• Artikelnr.: 57164852

Autorenporträt

Long Le-Khac is Assistant Professor of English at Loyola University Chicago.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: A Transfictional Solidarity
chapter abstract
The introduction opens with a little-known historical connection between
Asian Americans and Latinxs: U.S. escalation of the Vietnam War in March
1965 shaped the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic just a month later.
The opening shows how a shared transfictional form in Vietnamese and
Dominican American fictions helps perceive this entanglement of distinct
communities in the Cold War. The introduction clarifies the formation of an
Asian and Latinx America and the urgent stakes of solidarity between Asian
Americans and Latinxs. It argues for comparison through aesthetic form as a
method of comparative ethnic studies, and it theorizes transfictional form,
its relation to the novel and short story cycle, and its purchase on the
social tensions linking these communities. It outlines the differentiated
yet linked immigration history that makes alliance between these groups
difficult to envision. It concludes with a chapter overview.
1Decentering Bildungsroman Hermeneutics: Cisneros, Kingston, and Post-Civil
Rights Mobility
chapter abstract
The chapter follows Mexican Americans and Chinese Americans confronting the
uneven opportunities of the post-civil rights period. In this moment, the
bildungsroman, a genre with an individual-centered hermeneutics, reinforced
the neoconservative politics of individual development central to the
backlash against civil rights reforms. Troublingly, bildungsroman
hermeneutics also pervades reading practices, as seen in the criticism on
The House on Mango Street (1984) and The Woman Warrior (1976). Developing
approaches beyond this hermeneutics, the chapter traces how Sandra Cisneros
and Maxine Hong Kingston, alongside African American writer Gloria Naylor,
use transfictional form to decenter the bildungsroman's social vision and
outline collective shapes for feminist ethnic mobility. Their works stage
tensions between the protagonist's development and other characters whose
stories cannot progress, unveiling the divisions between minority
individuals who rose and the many still stymied by collective inequalities.
2Narrating Cold War Displacement: Junot Díaz and Aimee Phan Trace the
Migrations of U.S. Empire
chapter abstract
This chapter focuses on a post-Cold War generation of Asian Americans and
Latinxs struggling with American narratives that disconnected U.S. violence
in the Third World from the Third World migrations entering the U.S. Junot
Díaz's Drown (1996) and Aimee Phan's We Should Never Meet (2004) deploy a
transfictional tension between narrative borders and border crossings to
narrate the violently ruptured yet linked histories of the Dominican and
Vietnamese diasporas. Díaz develops a transnational chronotope connecting
Dominican immigration to the history of U.S. invasions of that nation. Phan
charts the displacement of Vietnamese refugees as inseparable from the
circuits of U.S. empire and outlines communities of shared fate for refugee
routes. This chapter reframes the immigrant and refugee as intertwined
categories justifying U.S. interventions. It uncovers how Asia and Latin
America were linked in a global military project and looks across the
regional divides in histories of the Cold War.
3Unsettling Strata and Type: Divided Communities of Neoliberal Immigration
in Karma and The People of Paper
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the neoliberal era of stratified immigration that
produces a discrepant range of immigrant fates-from undocumented labor to
knowledge workers. Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper (2005) and
Rishi Reddi's Karma (2007) depict Asian American and Latinx communities
divided by neoliberalism. The chapter shows how these works transpose major
and minor characters to unsettle narrative hierarchies that govern who
centers stories of ethnic communities. These transpositions destabilize the
reductive forms of racial stereotypes and neoliberal valuations. Scrambling
perceptions, Reddi and Plascencia highlight disadvantaged immigrants that
belie the idea of Indian American success and upwardly mobile youths that
complicate the idea of the Mexican American "underclass." Linking groups
that inhabit opposite ends of the immigration system, this chapter reveals
their shared struggles with the unequal life chances that neoliberal
immigration has wrought. It shows the linked projects of wealth and labor
extraction in Asia and Latin America.
4Forming Panethnicity: The Book of Unknown Americans and the Comparative
Work of Latinidad
chapter abstract
The unified identities driving earlier moments of identity politics can no
longer be taken for granted given the diversification of Asian American and
Latinx communities. This chapter brings together the debates on
panethnicity in Latinx and Asian American studies to show how their central
impasses are aligned. The chapter argues for rethinking panethnic identity,
a political fiction, with panethnic literary fictions. Cristina Henríquez's
The Book of Unknown Americans (2014) uses transfictional form to express
the antagonisms between panethnic unity and multiplicity. The novel tells
stories of migrants from across Latin America. These stories intersect but
do not merge into any narrative unity. Transfictional form, this chapter
argues, recognizes the Latinx differences that prevent Latinx experiences
from being told in any one story. This form simultaneously guides the
comparative thought needed to envision new shapes of panethnic alliance
that link Latinxs to each other and to broader formations.
5Imagining Unity: I Hotel and the Utopian Horizons of Asian America
chapter abstract
This chapter reimagines identity politics alongside Karen Tei Yamashita's
novel about the Asian American movement, I Hotel (2010). The novel's
converging and diverging form renders panethnic movements as a flux of
unity and dissolution and a network of slippages across ethnic boundaries.
This form situates conflicts within the Asian American movement as part of
broader social contradictions. Internal conflicts can orient panethnic
coalitions to a systemic and utopian horizon of justice. Utopian horizons
help reconsider unity and closure, ideas critiqued by the politics of
difference embraced in Asian American and Latinx studies. This chapter
recasts panethnic unity not as a political premise but as a promise to
struggle for, a horizon for imagining the just future that would make unity
free of contradiction possible. It calls Asian Americans and Latinxs to
look beyond their circumscribed borders and see their internal struggles
for unity as entangled with systemic projects of justice.
Conclusion: A Politics of Beyond
chapter abstract
The conclusion explains how fictional world-building can generate
theoretical models of the social worlds Asian Americans and Latinxs
navigate. Transfictional world-building draws readers beyond the borders of
a story. This aesthetics can inspire a politics of beyond in which Asian
Americans and Latinxs look beyond their own community borders to see their
interconnections. A politics of beyond calls Asian American and Latinx
coalitions struggling to define their boundaries to instead embrace their
porous borders and political entanglements with each other. The conclusion
suggests the potential power of such solidarities to address the conditions
that formed and continue to trouble the Asian and Latinx U.S. The book
concludes that engaging in Latinx struggles is essential to Asian American
politics and vice versa. The Asian and Latinx American political solidarity
we need to meet this idea requires a leap of imagination, which is why
fiction is so vital.
chapter abstract