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Descriptively, the term "Asian North American" could be applied to one
of two situations Asian American and Asian Canadian. "Asian
American" or "Asian Canadian" seems to mean "an American
or Canadian who is of Asian descent." Of course, this is an impossibly large
and amorphous category, and there are disputes and uncertainties over who
are exactly included under this appellation. This name seems to refer mainly
to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans or Canadians, but often also
includes, for example, Filipino, Vietnamese, South Asian, and Southeast
Asian Americans or Canadians. In practice, "Canadians of Asian origins often
identify themselves as Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians, or more
recently, Sri Lankan Canadians, or Filipino Canadians, rather than as Asian
Canadians" (Ty and Goellnicht 2004, 6). As Canadian scholar
Goellnicht (2000, 16) points out, there has been a different classification system in Canada that
stresses the relatively autonomous and isolated body of works by East and
Southeast Asian Canadian authors, who are often classified as belonging to
Canadian Commonwealth literature or postcolonial literature. This fact has made "the
already small field of Asian Canadian literature smaller, more
divided." This paper aims to articulate some central critical issues and challenges facing the
scholars working in the field of Asian North American literary and cultural studies.
In doing so, it also provides a framework within which to identify and
evaluate the recent critical and theoretical orientations in the field. My purpose is
to argue for the urgent need to re-conceive ethnicity and race not as "things"
or "entities" but rather as "perspectives" on the world in Asian North
American studies. This is because "ethnicity" as an ostensible discursive substitute
for "race" may in fact reinforce it. Likewise, ethnic identity is not a matter
of stable, essential identity but a matter of conflicts of identity and processes
of identification. In identifying issues and problems like these, this paper
aims for a meta-critical reconsideration of the fundamental assumptions of the field.
Politically, the term "Asian American" was first used in the 1960s and
the 1970s to create a unified political voice in a political coalition of different
ethnic Asian communities in the US. Yet outside the narrowly defined scope of
political strategy, "Asian American" does not necessarily always carry
positive connotations. For example, Asian American literature is not necessarily
all positive in its representation of Asian Americans. Focusing mainly on
literary works by South Asian American writers, Inderpal Grewal points up the
necessity of unraveling ideologies of male patriarchal lineage in the work of Amitav
Ghosh and of criticizing Bharati Mukherjee for her simplistic evocation of America
as the land of freedom for oppressed women from traditional cultures.
Differences and comparisons between Asian American, Asian Canadian, Asian
Australian orientations, for example, can create further difficulties. The paradox is
that any attempt to differentiate between Asian American, Canadian,
Australian, British, and so on, only serves, at least partially, to reaffirm the validity
and fixity of "national" boundaries. There is also the paradox of "Pan-Asianness"
or "Pan-Asian collective identity": an artificially constructed and politically
reified collective identity which serves to reinforce and perpetuate the
very marginalized identity that it seeks to dismantle and re-center. |
