Restoried Selves: Autobiographies of Queer Asian/Pacific American Activists

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

I picked up this book from the gay library a few weeks back and have found it to be nice read to fill in moments since the autobiographical essays are all very short.



The editor Kevin K. Kumashiro is an education professor with research in the experiences of queer students of color in the education system. He has pulled together these brief essays from a range of "activists"--used both broadly to mean everyone who struggles against racist, homophobic, sexist, and other oppressive systems in their daily lives as well as more narrowly to describe those who actively make such struggle a part of their identity and working practice in policy advocacy, journalism, community organizing, and other such work. Most of the contributors are not (yet) widely known as activists or writers--I only recognized the amazing writer/thinker/activist Helen Zia, the cultural studies scholar Wei Ming Dariotis, and the sociologist Dana Takagi who provides an afterword. But that is part of the point of this collection, to provide a place for the voices of those who fight in the trenches but are generally unheard and unacknowledged as doing work in their communities and families to change the world.

Most of the stories have a similar kind of arc, describing the activist-author's childhood of feeling outcast as both a racial minority and as a non-conformist for gender/sexuality norms. There is then a moment of revelation about not accepting the labels given by the society at large and a subsequent turn to addressing that oppressive labeling in activist work. Despite this similarity, the range of ways in which the authors compose their essays is worth considering. Some are explicitly influenced by more "postmodern" storytelling with fragmentary anecdotes adding up to a larger, complex, even self-contradictory sense of self. Others break off into poetic strophes. And some, such as Kumashiro in his narrative, reach for a kind of interplay between different modes of essay writing (a more detached voice versus the confessional, autobiographical subject) that are differentiated in the text by different fonts.

It's worth thinking about this kind of autobiographical essay writing in conjunction with the more widely available book-lengthy memoir by individual authors. In content, too, this collection touches on but never really directly addresses that kind of tension between activism (doing in the world) and research (thinking, analyzing, writing) that often undergirds social justice-oriented fields of study like gay and lesbian studies, women's studies, and Asian American studies.

Kudos also go to Kumashiro for collecting such a broad range of activist voices. He seems especially conscious of diversity within these categories of "Queer" and "Asian Pacific American," not letting simply gay men and East Asian Americans to speak for everyone else. He succeeds in representing various Asian ethnics, mixed-race Asians, Pacific Islanders, transgendered individuals, and bisexuals--many of whom, in their essays, note the kind of marginality of their experiences even to an imagined center of gay Asian America.

Ultimately, I can see collection as an especially great resource for school libraries, education graduate programs, and people outside of the educational system who are seeking narratives that resonate with theirs (or their children's, as the preface by parents of a queer Asian American point out). The concept of "restoried selves," as the editor explains, is about rescripting those stories and narratives that we grow up with and that make us queer Asian Pacific Americans invisible, unwanted, and otherwise oppressed. Restorying is an act of seizing a voice for oneself as well as of "restoring" a sense of validity in existence and struggle.

Comments

[thebowlerhat.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you reviewed this book. I bought it last year, but it's been sitting on my shelf collecting dust because I wasn't sure of the quality of writing involved. I like the idea of "restorying" and "restoring" though. As a creative nonfiction/autobiographical writer, I like the idea of a multiplicity of autobiographies captured here.

I know you mention that a lot of the activist writers are not well-known - do you still think the writing is more literary in style or more like, I-have-a- story-so-I'm-writing-it-because-I-can (like Katy Robinson, or a lot of other adoptee memoirs out there not written by Jane Jeong Trenka)?

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

I had the same kind of wariness about the quality of writing when I picked it up.... The essays are mostly not that "literary," but the overall impression you get is the range of ways that individuals turn to language and storytelling in order to convey their identities and experiences. So, even though they generally have a more straightforward, transparent (confessional?) writing style, there is actually quite a bit of variance still across the essays. And of course there are a handful that are more deliberately writerly. As a whole, it still reads differently from the book-length, single-authored memoirs that are less literarily-focused because there are some seventeen different voices and writing styles in it. I probably would not have read the whole book if any one of the essays went on for 200 pages, though.