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.

The landmark texts of Asian American literature from the mid-twentieth century have often been classified as realist. Presenting “real-life” depictions of Japanese American incarceration during World War II and the immigrant experience, for instance, Asian American writing of the time is known for its referentiality to historical events. Recently, however, literary critics have sought to redefine the genre of realism, which has also led to a reconsideration of how canonical Asian American literature represented the deeper structure of Asian American life from 1930 to 1965. This chapter traces how Asian American literary critics have offered a more theoretically complex approach to realism in order to help draw out richer understandings of the way Asian American literature has articulated Asian American social experience. In addition, this entry provides brief readings of classic Asian American texts, notably John Okada’s No-No Boy and Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, through a realist frame.