Review article
Migration, Ethnicity, Racism: Narrative Strategies in Asian American Writing
E. San Juan, Jr.
; Department of Ethnic Studies Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA
Abstract
The entry of Asian bodies into the United States continent is part of the worldwide labor migration that began in the sixteenth century and culminated in the U.S. imperial domination of the Philippines with the Spanish-American War of 1898. To symbolize the traumatic experience of uprooting and racist violence suffered by Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino migrants in the United States, ethnic artists from these diverse communities deploy several strategies: postmodernist affirmation of heterogeneity (in Frank Chin and Jeffery Chan), counter-identification and dis-identification (in Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee, Hisaya Yamamoto), and prophetic figuration (Carlos Bulosan). These strategies articulate some of the ways in which Asian Americans attempt through ideological critique to overcome racism, exclusion, marginalization, and cooptation. In this process, the "Orientalized" or exoticized subject, grounded in the vicissitudes of U.S. capital accumulation (Depression, Cold War, and global commodification), can be appreciated as an appositional, emancipatory force with its own viable if limited historical agency. The goal of this ethnic art is the transcendence of racial oppression and liberation from the bondage of transnational capital.
Keywords
immigration; racism; ethnicity; Asian Americans; narrative strategies; community; capitalism
Hrčak ID:
126628
URI
Publication date:
30.9.1997.
Visits: 2.886 *