Immigrant authors in the United States write under the shadow of hostile laws that challenge expectations of political equality and belonging. Tales of repudiation and resistance mark the uncertainties of transit and the dangers of arrival. This study of Asian American texts exposes how US immigration laws naturalize race and redefine identities and lineage. Immigration law transformed American narrative forms to create a global and intercultural literature in which Asian migrants refuse to be turned into perpetual outsiders.

Reconstruction legislators faced the uncomfortable yet broadly acknowledged fact that the U.S. Constitution had countenanced slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment set out to guarantee and secure civil freedom through the reassertion of the U.S. Constitution, yet its expansive possibilities proved short-lived. Anti-Chinese ideologues and nativists challenged birthright citizenship and advanced new legislation restricting legal entry into the United States. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the nation’s first raced immigration and naturalization ban, helped stabilize the meaning and value of citizenship as the federal judiciary began narrowing the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. By the end of the century, the Chinese Exclusion Acts and federal rulings on Chinese immigration cases completed the redefinition of the Asiatic as the categorically excluded. Among the earliest Asian American writers to publish in English, Wong Chin Foo and Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far) produced a wide-ranging body of journalism and short fiction that addressed public anxieties over “contraband Chinese.” The criminalized “illegal immigrant” remains a ready foil for the citizen, shoring up fantasies of national belonging as our civil liberties face increasing erosion. The writers discussed in this chapter offer us a unique vantage on this conflicted and evolving history of U.S. citizenship.

Julia Lee identifies temporal, spatial, and affective innovation in 21st century transpacific fiction. Locating formally innovative contemporary Asian American writing in the post-1965 contexts of migration, global economies of labor, environmental anxiety, language difference, and racialized violence, Lee shows how writers have represented new technologies of immediate communication across oceanic flows of migrants, commodities, information, and waste in disjointed, parallel, and non-sequential narrative structures. Childhood trauma lingers across time and geography in a story about a Filipino nurse by Mia Alvar, while novels by Min Jin Lee, Ruth Ozeki, and Thi Bui layer Asian and American modernities, postmodernities, and contemporary present-tenses.

Since the turn of the millennium a number of novels that look back to the Korean War have appeared in English including Ha Jin’s War Trash, Hwang Sok-yong’s The Guest, Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered and Jayne Anne Phillips’s Lark and Termite. These works issue address a location, the Korean peninsula, that interrupts putatively global frameworks for understanding the contemporary. Korea’s postcoloniality remains suspended as it has manifested in two still divided nation-state and its ongoing civil war testifies to the fact that the Cold War’s putative end is not an entirely global phenomenon. Moreover, these works illuminate how the “contact nebulae” (to use Karen Thornber’s phrase) that define East Asia—the formations of transculturation indigenous to that region—are not only shot through by complex asymmetries of power but also intertwined with more global histories of war and empire. As such, the network of literary examined in this essay contribute to a theorizing of the contemporary and of world literature that is attuned tracking the dynamic interaction of the multiple temporal and spatial registers—global, regional and national—in which various modalities of worlding take place.

Scholars in Asia have argued that to teach Asian American literature in Asia, one must take liberties to queer and subvert this very literature - to see it within transpacific narratives of colonization and empire, to look at it as a historical inventory of the ways in which this literature erases, dismisses, or seeks to “other” Asia. In this chapter, I reflect upon my experiences teaching, queering, and subverting Asian American literature during more than five years at three universities in Nanjing, China, and in Hong Kong. As a mixed Filipino/white man who was most often seen as “Eurasian,” I witnessed students racialize me either as living proof of American multicultural exceptionalism or as its very opposite: the exilic Chinese who had come to claim my true home. Teaching Asian American literature, I found, brought these presumptions to the fore and allowed me to undo many of the presumptions placed upon me as a self-exile descended from American colonial subjects. My experiences lead me to suggest that rather than just queering or critiquing Asian American literature, educators teach Asian American literature as an ambiguous archive that can reframe commonsense notions of what it means to be American or Asian.

The introduction to Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965-1996: Volume Three traces the formation of the Asian American literary canon as it was taking shape during the years the volume considers. In doing so, it attends to the rise of Asian American studies as a distinct interdiscipline, tracking the historical, political, and aesthetic debates that helped to define the field. In addition, the introduction gives the larger context for the four sections that organize the volume ("Immigration, Migration, and Movement," "Politics, Art, and Activism," "Institutionalization and Canon Formation," and "Diaspora and the Transnational Turn"), and provides summaries of the individual chapters.

This chapter contributes to the new scholarship on Asian American literary form by considering the novel No-No Boy by John Okada, a foundational text for Asian American literature. A mixed critical reception has resulted from the novel’s vexed relationship to form. Early reviewers rejected it as aesthetically flawed, its original audience ignored it, and, despite its canonical status today, its formal activity has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. Arguing that this trend may have something to do with the type of form exhibited in the novel – one that is both minimal and unfamiliar – the chapter identifies one such example, designating it as a “formal situation” in which a Japanese American male character is interrupted in the act of speaking for himself. By tracking this “formal situation” in three crucial places in the novel – the internment camp, the colony, the reservation – the chapter demonstrates how the work of literary form, even one that appears barely discernible, can reveal a larger critique of American empire articulating itself as an act of speaking for oneself.

Multiculturalism affects institutions crucial to our daily lives: government, workplaces, schools, historical records, the media, laws, and art. It justifies who can participate in politics and whether those such as Asian Americans who have been historically excluded and voiceless will be heard and thus influence policies and resource distribution. This political terrain affects the literary marketplace that may incorporate authors and communities of color who have been historically ignored or rejected for their criticism of Eurocentrism or failure to uphold white norms. Working within a field coming into prominence alongside and because of multiculturalism, Asian American writers understand themselves and their texts to be part of reclaiming forgotten experiences and histories as well as diversifying the imaginative landscape of US literature. As unintended consequences of multiculturalism’s emphasis on Asian cuisine, holidays, or other cultural traditions, Asian Americans are perceived as having a culture that benefits and disadvantages them in terms of citizenship and spheres of agency, denying them full citizenship, upward mobility, equal pay, or artistic capabilities.

Published in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior instantly became a field-defining work. This chapter examines how this genre-bending text, together with its long critical afterlife, has become one of the most influential pieces in Asian American literature. How has literary criticism on The Woman Warrior responded to and at the same time shaped the contours of Asian American literary studies? How does Kingston’s book speak to contemporary concerns within Asian American literature and culture? How did Kingston’s text set the terms, for better or for worse, of Asian American feminisms? Finally, should we still be reading, teaching, and studying The Woman Warrior four decades later? Looking back at The Woman Warrior and the vast field of scholarship surrounding it more than forty years later helps the reader understand some of the defining moments and questions in the now-recognizable Asian American literary archive during the course of its formation, development, and transition.

Cultural identities are developed through new critical frameworks for Asian American aesthetics. The shifting demographic changes in Asian America as well as the growth of new literary forms such as graphic narratives shape our critical investments and produce alternative subject formations. Arguing for plurality and flexibility, this chapter looks at the productive ways that experimental forms of literature such as graphic narratives can resist the totalization and commodification of Asian American identity. Rejecting reductive stereotypical representations of Asian Americans and emphasizing the need for a reconceptualization of how we discuss race, graphic narratives challenge existing caricatures and stereotypes, problematize the narratives of race, and offer experimental forms of representation.