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stephenhongsohn.livejournal.comA Review of Yoonmee Chang’s Writing the Ghetto (Rutgers University Press)
Yoonmee Chang’s Writing the Ghetto is, to put it simply, one of those monographs that I have been waiting for. As a scholar interested in urban studies, it seemed to be quite interesting that no Asian Americanist had really taken into account the importance of local urban sites in the construction and configuration of literary terrains. In this respect, Chang’s monograph offers an incisive account of why Asian Americanists and American literary scholars more broadly need to be considering the urban with respect to Asian American populations. Chang’s argument is provocative and exceedingly useful. She provides a template to think about the four major texts that are the focus of her study and offers an analytical frame that possesses wide applicability. Chang argues: “For Asian Americans, the language of ‘ghetto’ has given over to the language of ‘ethnic enclave.’ On the one hand, this move empowers and gives agency to the Asian American underclass. On the other, it ironically diminishes attention to the structural class inequities that ‘ethnic enclave’ can empower ghetto workers and residents against. At the center of the recasting of the Asian American ghetto into an ethnic enclave is a culturalization of class. The culturalization of class is not unique to [end to page 27] Asian Americans, but it distinguishes Asian Americans as a racial group whose structural ghettoization is insistently obscured” (28). What is clearly articulated is how space, race, class, and cultural production all function in tandem. Especially important is how gracefully Chang forefronts that Asian Americans become model minorities through the cultural capital transposed onto the ghetto.
As a site of exoticization, the ghetto could function as a space to fetishize, to orientalize, and to delineate through an image of racial uplift. Even as this objectification elevates Asian Americans within the auspices of the urban space, it nevertheless results in a kind of masking effect that make class analyses particularly more difficult to locate and mobilize. Chang’s task is therefore set. As Chang advances, “At stake is how Asian Americans are made legible, or more to the point, illegible in terms of class inequity. The illegibility of Asian American ghettoization is central to shoring up larger national investments in denying class inequity, in legitimating the myth of America’s exceptional classlessness. Asian American ghettoization is made illegible through what I detail as ‘culturalizations’ or ‘culturalist epistemologies,’ ways of imagining Asian American subjectivity and experience primarily through the lens of culture” (2). While class is often presumed to be part and parcel of Asian American literary analyses, it does not often come to the forefront of an entire monograph as it does in Chang’s work. In recent memory, only Christine So’s Economic Citizens has managed, in my opinion, to do much work at the intersections of Asian American literature, class, and race. Chang concretizes her thesis through some central Asian American literary texts, including but not limited to Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter, and Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone. She even includes a chapter on a suburban ethnography S. Mitra Kalita’s Suburban Sahibs. This chapter is particularly important for elucidating the materialist and historicist register of Chang’s work. Because Chang moves from different historical and ethnic contexts, she must continually alter her own critical methodologies in concert—a difficult, but ultimately rewarding task. On the one hand, she demonstrates the heterogeneity of spatial frameworks from which to consider Asian American populations, but she continually shows, across a wide swathe of contexts, how her theory can be applied.
This monograph could obviously be used as a companion text to any course that looks at the intersections of urban studies and Asian American literature. Since Bone, Native Speaker, and Nisei Daughter are so widely taught, it is certainly a monograph that could find use as a whole, instead of as single chapters. It is unfortunate that it is only in hardcover at this time. One hopes that, like the earlier reviewed, Contesting Genres, that Writing the Ghetto will ultimately find its way out of the hardcover “ghetto” and into the paperback.
Buy the book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Ghetto-Authorship-Literatures-Initiative/dp/0813548012/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297806948&sr=8-1
Yoonmee Chang’s Writing the Ghetto is, to put it simply, one of those monographs that I have been waiting for. As a scholar interested in urban studies, it seemed to be quite interesting that no Asian Americanist had really taken into account the importance of local urban sites in the construction and configuration of literary terrains. In this respect, Chang’s monograph offers an incisive account of why Asian Americanists and American literary scholars more broadly need to be considering the urban with respect to Asian American populations. Chang’s argument is provocative and exceedingly useful. She provides a template to think about the four major texts that are the focus of her study and offers an analytical frame that possesses wide applicability. Chang argues: “For Asian Americans, the language of ‘ghetto’ has given over to the language of ‘ethnic enclave.’ On the one hand, this move empowers and gives agency to the Asian American underclass. On the other, it ironically diminishes attention to the structural class inequities that ‘ethnic enclave’ can empower ghetto workers and residents against. At the center of the recasting of the Asian American ghetto into an ethnic enclave is a culturalization of class. The culturalization of class is not unique to [end to page 27] Asian Americans, but it distinguishes Asian Americans as a racial group whose structural ghettoization is insistently obscured” (28). What is clearly articulated is how space, race, class, and cultural production all function in tandem. Especially important is how gracefully Chang forefronts that Asian Americans become model minorities through the cultural capital transposed onto the ghetto.
As a site of exoticization, the ghetto could function as a space to fetishize, to orientalize, and to delineate through an image of racial uplift. Even as this objectification elevates Asian Americans within the auspices of the urban space, it nevertheless results in a kind of masking effect that make class analyses particularly more difficult to locate and mobilize. Chang’s task is therefore set. As Chang advances, “At stake is how Asian Americans are made legible, or more to the point, illegible in terms of class inequity. The illegibility of Asian American ghettoization is central to shoring up larger national investments in denying class inequity, in legitimating the myth of America’s exceptional classlessness. Asian American ghettoization is made illegible through what I detail as ‘culturalizations’ or ‘culturalist epistemologies,’ ways of imagining Asian American subjectivity and experience primarily through the lens of culture” (2). While class is often presumed to be part and parcel of Asian American literary analyses, it does not often come to the forefront of an entire monograph as it does in Chang’s work. In recent memory, only Christine So’s Economic Citizens has managed, in my opinion, to do much work at the intersections of Asian American literature, class, and race. Chang concretizes her thesis through some central Asian American literary texts, including but not limited to Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter, and Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone. She even includes a chapter on a suburban ethnography S. Mitra Kalita’s Suburban Sahibs. This chapter is particularly important for elucidating the materialist and historicist register of Chang’s work. Because Chang moves from different historical and ethnic contexts, she must continually alter her own critical methodologies in concert—a difficult, but ultimately rewarding task. On the one hand, she demonstrates the heterogeneity of spatial frameworks from which to consider Asian American populations, but she continually shows, across a wide swathe of contexts, how her theory can be applied.
This monograph could obviously be used as a companion text to any course that looks at the intersections of urban studies and Asian American literature. Since Bone, Native Speaker, and Nisei Daughter are so widely taught, it is certainly a monograph that could find use as a whole, instead of as single chapters. It is unfortunate that it is only in hardcover at this time. One hopes that, like the earlier reviewed, Contesting Genres, that Writing the Ghetto will ultimately find its way out of the hardcover “ghetto” and into the paperback.
Buy the book Here:
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Ghetto-Authorship-Literatures-Initiative/dp/0813548012/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1297806948&sr=8-1
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