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.

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.

When it comes to food and race, the connection is often one of identity: how the one comes to stand in for the other and vice versa. This chapter invites readers to theorize food and consumption in Asian American literature by attending to food, not as an expression of identity, but as that which profoundly destabilizes (and perhaps even dissolves) identity and by questioning the association between food as matter and race as matter. It focuses on the tropes of ingestion, farming, and environmental and human health in On Such a Full Sea, Chang-rae Lee’s most and least Asian American novel, as a way to meditate on the nature of racial/ethnic (im)materiality. By turning to the crises of food and ecology as sites that trouble the division between the human and the animal, the consumer and the consumed, Lee forces us to reconsider our easy assumptions about racial-ethnic identity and the corporeal integrity that presumably substantiates that identity.