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stephenhongsohn.livejournal.comA Review of Betsy Huang’s Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (Palgrave, 2010)
There has been some talk about a movement of “new formalisms” afoot in Asian American literary criticism. A number of monographs have recently considered aspects of form in relation to racial identity. Betsy Huang’s Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction adds to this impressive and dynamic body of work. The brilliance of Huang’s work is that she makes readers rethink and reconsider genres that are often interfaced with and considered in reductive ways. Huang’s argument is elegantly crafted and unfolds over the course of three chapters. Huang focuses on analyzing what we might call three “popular” genres: immigrant fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. Her motive to do so stems in part from the fact that all three genres have been, in some form, instantiated by an Orientalist impulse that has codified reductive configurations of the “Asian” or “Asian American” character. She further seeks to address the lack of attention paid to genres that have typically been overlooked in the sense that they have sometimes been considered too pulpy or too lowbrow to be seriously critiqued. Huang’s aim is “to help redress the current imbalance between formal and sociopolitical analyses by foregrounding genre as the site for developing a transformative Asian American politics [end of 4] of form. I believe that the political impact of a work—whether resistant, accommodationist, or ambivalent—is ultimately located in the author’s negotiations with the convention he or she is expected to execute” (5). To this end, Huang’s book eloquently executes this goal.
Perhaps, one of the most brilliant interventions that Huang offers is the kind of self-consciousness that these writers show to genre conventions and how they then problematize them in order to productively frustrate readerly investments. For instance, her chapter on immigrant fictions shows that recovery of any familial or social history is at most only partial and thus destabilizes the desire for the unified Asian American immigrant subject, who has achieved a kind of national inclusion or citizenship. She pays close attention to two “contemporary” classics of Asian American fiction, le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, to concretize how immigrant fictions are retooled and transformed. Her readings of “crime fiction” explore how Asian American writers play with the polarities of the model minority and yellow peril paradigms. I especially found her readings of Chinatown illuminating. For instance, her critique of Ed Lin’s This is a Bust offers up a de-exotification of Chinatown, disabling the desire to locate an inassimilable alien other within those apparently deep and opium-ridden depths. Huang’s discussion of American Woman, shows how certain repressed histories can emerge more forcefully in comparison to the recreation and reconsideration of more sensationalized and media-intensified events. In the last chapter, Huang investigates the richly layered offerings of Asian American writers who confront techno-Orientalist depictions. She critiques Greg Pak’s film, Robot Stories, Ted Chiang’s novella, Story of Your Life, and Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love. Again, what I find particularly attractive about Huang’s work is that she devotes her time to texts that have not, as a collective, been given enough scholarly consideration. The structure of this chapter is particularly enticing as she interrogates three important tropes within science fiction: “the alien encounter, the robot fable, and the future dystopia” (102).
Of the three chapters, the one that I found most surprising and most useful to my understanding of aesthetics and Asian American racial formation was the crime genre chapter. Precisely because, as Huang notes, genre fictions are often not paid serious enough attention, their complexities can go unnoticed and unearthed. My own lenses related to crime fiction had to be widened in this respect. I have tended to read “Asian American” crime fiction primarily through its complicated plotting and the desire to find out “who committed a crime.” Huang’s chapter pushes readers to consider how Asian Americans have historically been located through their relationship to the law: “More than a moment that merely exposes the social and legal injustices Asian Americans have suffered, it opens up a critical space for interrogating the social imperatives imposed on Asian Americans through discourses and mechanisms of the ‘Law.’ And to the extent that social law is underwritten by the state, and narrative laws are backed by entrenched traditions and conventions, a challenge to the law and to stereotypes is by extension a challenge to established authority and received knowledge. Crime fiction, a genre in which enforcement and violation of the law converge in form and them, thus proves a rich site for Asian American aesthetic and political critique” (50). This specific genre is aptly suited for the kind of retooling and transformation that an Asian American writer engages. Thus, a novel like Lin's This is a Bust, Huang argues, reverses the expectation that the Asian American is either a "model minority" a la the Charlie Chan stereotype, or the "Fu Manchu," someone to be found deep within the abyss that is the impenetrable Chinatown. Instead, the protagonist of Lin's This is a Bust is a far more ambivalent figure, who must work tactically within and beside the law to solve crimes. Huang demonstrates that this positionality is largely more indicative and symbolic of the way Asian Americans have faced contradictory relationships with the nation-state and subject formation under juridical apparatuses.
The one major drawback to Huang’s book is its very pricey cost, which is currently a hefty $60.18 at amazon.com (discounted from $75). In an age where literary criticism continues to attract a specialized audience, Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction stands as a book that ethnic studies scholas would want to own in their personal libraries. Despite its steep pricing, it is certainly a book one must order for any university or college research holding. What Huang’s monograph further offers is a push to Asian Americanists and scholars located in ethnic studies to more dutifully consider the importance of all genres to the production of critical meaning. This work makes me want to think deeply about other “pulpy” genres too. With the emergence for instance of Chicklit, I wondered about how to make aesthetic AND political sense of a genre often linked to frothy plots and seemingly superficial romantic hijinks. Also given my recent interest in the graphic novel, I wondered how we might approach Huang’s thesis in relation to that genre, with its inclusion of the visual narrative. In this vein, Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction generous opens up to other critical conversations for future studies and finds expansive application. I’ll definitely teaching this book alongside primary text materials in future courses!
Links for the book:
http://us.macmillan.com/contestinggenresincontemporaryasianamericanfiction
http://www.amazon.com/Contesting-Genres-Contemporary-American-Fiction/dp/0230108318
There has been some talk about a movement of “new formalisms” afoot in Asian American literary criticism. A number of monographs have recently considered aspects of form in relation to racial identity. Betsy Huang’s Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction adds to this impressive and dynamic body of work. The brilliance of Huang’s work is that she makes readers rethink and reconsider genres that are often interfaced with and considered in reductive ways. Huang’s argument is elegantly crafted and unfolds over the course of three chapters. Huang focuses on analyzing what we might call three “popular” genres: immigrant fiction, crime fiction, and science fiction. Her motive to do so stems in part from the fact that all three genres have been, in some form, instantiated by an Orientalist impulse that has codified reductive configurations of the “Asian” or “Asian American” character. She further seeks to address the lack of attention paid to genres that have typically been overlooked in the sense that they have sometimes been considered too pulpy or too lowbrow to be seriously critiqued. Huang’s aim is “to help redress the current imbalance between formal and sociopolitical analyses by foregrounding genre as the site for developing a transformative Asian American politics [end of 4] of form. I believe that the political impact of a work—whether resistant, accommodationist, or ambivalent—is ultimately located in the author’s negotiations with the convention he or she is expected to execute” (5). To this end, Huang’s book eloquently executes this goal.
Perhaps, one of the most brilliant interventions that Huang offers is the kind of self-consciousness that these writers show to genre conventions and how they then problematize them in order to productively frustrate readerly investments. For instance, her chapter on immigrant fictions shows that recovery of any familial or social history is at most only partial and thus destabilizes the desire for the unified Asian American immigrant subject, who has achieved a kind of national inclusion or citizenship. She pays close attention to two “contemporary” classics of Asian American fiction, le thi diem thuy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, to concretize how immigrant fictions are retooled and transformed. Her readings of “crime fiction” explore how Asian American writers play with the polarities of the model minority and yellow peril paradigms. I especially found her readings of Chinatown illuminating. For instance, her critique of Ed Lin’s This is a Bust offers up a de-exotification of Chinatown, disabling the desire to locate an inassimilable alien other within those apparently deep and opium-ridden depths. Huang’s discussion of American Woman, shows how certain repressed histories can emerge more forcefully in comparison to the recreation and reconsideration of more sensationalized and media-intensified events. In the last chapter, Huang investigates the richly layered offerings of Asian American writers who confront techno-Orientalist depictions. She critiques Greg Pak’s film, Robot Stories, Ted Chiang’s novella, Story of Your Life, and Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love. Again, what I find particularly attractive about Huang’s work is that she devotes her time to texts that have not, as a collective, been given enough scholarly consideration. The structure of this chapter is particularly enticing as she interrogates three important tropes within science fiction: “the alien encounter, the robot fable, and the future dystopia” (102).
Of the three chapters, the one that I found most surprising and most useful to my understanding of aesthetics and Asian American racial formation was the crime genre chapter. Precisely because, as Huang notes, genre fictions are often not paid serious enough attention, their complexities can go unnoticed and unearthed. My own lenses related to crime fiction had to be widened in this respect. I have tended to read “Asian American” crime fiction primarily through its complicated plotting and the desire to find out “who committed a crime.” Huang’s chapter pushes readers to consider how Asian Americans have historically been located through their relationship to the law: “More than a moment that merely exposes the social and legal injustices Asian Americans have suffered, it opens up a critical space for interrogating the social imperatives imposed on Asian Americans through discourses and mechanisms of the ‘Law.’ And to the extent that social law is underwritten by the state, and narrative laws are backed by entrenched traditions and conventions, a challenge to the law and to stereotypes is by extension a challenge to established authority and received knowledge. Crime fiction, a genre in which enforcement and violation of the law converge in form and them, thus proves a rich site for Asian American aesthetic and political critique” (50). This specific genre is aptly suited for the kind of retooling and transformation that an Asian American writer engages. Thus, a novel like Lin's This is a Bust, Huang argues, reverses the expectation that the Asian American is either a "model minority" a la the Charlie Chan stereotype, or the "Fu Manchu," someone to be found deep within the abyss that is the impenetrable Chinatown. Instead, the protagonist of Lin's This is a Bust is a far more ambivalent figure, who must work tactically within and beside the law to solve crimes. Huang demonstrates that this positionality is largely more indicative and symbolic of the way Asian Americans have faced contradictory relationships with the nation-state and subject formation under juridical apparatuses.
The one major drawback to Huang’s book is its very pricey cost, which is currently a hefty $60.18 at amazon.com (discounted from $75). In an age where literary criticism continues to attract a specialized audience, Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction stands as a book that ethnic studies scholas would want to own in their personal libraries. Despite its steep pricing, it is certainly a book one must order for any university or college research holding. What Huang’s monograph further offers is a push to Asian Americanists and scholars located in ethnic studies to more dutifully consider the importance of all genres to the production of critical meaning. This work makes me want to think deeply about other “pulpy” genres too. With the emergence for instance of Chicklit, I wondered about how to make aesthetic AND political sense of a genre often linked to frothy plots and seemingly superficial romantic hijinks. Also given my recent interest in the graphic novel, I wondered how we might approach Huang’s thesis in relation to that genre, with its inclusion of the visual narrative. In this vein, Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction generous opens up to other critical conversations for future studies and finds expansive application. I’ll definitely teaching this book alongside primary text materials in future courses!
Links for the book:
http://us.macmillan.com/contestinggenresincontemporaryasianamericanfiction
http://www.amazon.com/Contesting-Genres-Contemporary-American-Fiction/dp/0230108318
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