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Asian American Women's Popular Literature: Feminizing Genres and Neoliberal Belonging PDF

237 Pages·2013·1.808 MB·English
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Asian American Women’s Popular Literature Asian American Women’s Popular Literature Feminizing Genres and Neoliberal Belonging pamela thoma Temple University Press philadelphia Temple University Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2014 by Temple University All rights reserved Chapter 3 appeared as “Romancing the Self and Negotiating Consumer Citizenship in Asian American Labor Lit” in Contemporary Women’s Writing 2013; doi: 10.1093/cww/vps036. Published 2014 library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Thoma, Pamela S. (Pamela Sue), 1961– Asian American women’s popular literature : feminizing genres and neoliberal belonging / Pamela Thoma. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4399-1018-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4399-1019-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4399-1020-7 (e-book) 1. American literature—Asian American authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Asian American women— Intellectual life. 4. Women and literature—United States. 5. Asian American women in literature. I. Title. PS153.A84T48 2013 810.9’895—dc23 2013016619 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48– 1992 Printed in the United States of America 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org. Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Asian American Women’s Popular Literature, Neoliberalism, and Cultural Citizenship 1 2 Asian American Mother-Daughter Narrative and the Neoliberal American Dream of Transformative Femininity 38 3 Romancing the Self and Negotiating Postfeminist Consumer Citizenship in Asian American Women’s Labor Lit 79 4 Neoliberal Detective Work: Uncovering Cosmopolitan Corruption in the New Economy 111 5 Food Writing and Transnational Belonging in Global Consumer Culture 152 6 Conclusion: Crossing Over and Going Public 173 Notes 181 Bibliography 199 Index 217 Acknowledgments I have many to thank for their support while I worked on this project. I owe Andy Dephtereos a great debt of gratitude for being involved in nearly every aspect of this book and for always believing in my work. You have journeyed with me, Andy, to all the places I wanted to go and to those places I needed to go. Thank you. I also thank Randy and Maisie, who have been exemplars of the best companion species ever. They have been beside me in the still snows of the Maine woods and the roaring winds of the Palouse hills, always reminding me of the world beyond human knowledge. I owe them many more walks and hope they will wait for me to catch up. I want to thank mentors who were especially attentive and caring, including Katherine Burkman at The Ohio State University; Carol Cantrell and Paola Malpezzi-Price at Colorado State University; and Janet Jacobs, Alison Jaggar, Suzanne Juhasz, Ann Kibbey, Beth Robert- son, Marcia Westkott, and especially Katheryn Rios at the University of Colorado at Boulder. My graduate school mates also made that time a terrifically rewarding experience, and include Joan Gabriele, Kayann Short, Damian Doyle, and DeLinda Wunder. Several colleagues from my years at Colby College have contributed to this work, supporting me through their friendship and in other ways that cannot be fully acknowledged here: Betty Sasaki, Lyn Mikel Brown, Jorge Olivares, David Suchoff, Hannah Roisman, Yossi Roisman, Tarja Raag, Maritza Straughn-Williams, and Mark Tappan. At Washington State University I thank colleagues in the former Department of Women’s Studies: Luz viii / acknowledgments María Gordillo, Linda Heidenreich, Judy Meuth, Marian Sciachitano, Nishant Shahani, and Noël Sturgeon; colleagues in English: Kristen Arola, Joan Burbick, and TV Reed; the creative minds in Fine Arts, especially Io Palmer, Reza Safavi, Kevin Haas, Michelle Forsythe, and Maria DePrano; and colleagues in Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies, with special thanks to fellow Asian Americanists Rory Ong and John Streamas and to Rose Smetana. I also thank Gabriella Reznowski at WSU for fabulous research assistance (at lightning speed). And what would any of this work be without the hope and inspiration of students? I want to acknowledge my former and my current students for their enthusiasm and insight, with special thanks to Mary Jo Klinker, who helped me maintain perspective as I completed this project. I’d like to thank the many colleagues in American studies, Asian American studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at various institutions for their abiding commitment to interdisciplinary research, teaching, and dialogue, often of the feminist sort, especially Tamara Bhalla, Leslie Bow, Noelle Brada-Williams, Chris Breu, Yoonmee Chang, John Cheng, Floyd Cheung, Marilyn Chin, Monica Chiu, Karen Chow, Shilpa Davé, Patti Duncan, Karen Leong, Cynthia Franklin, Lynn Fuji- wara, Ruth Hsu, Paul Lai, Rachel Lee, Rich Lee, Suzanne Leonard, Anita Mannur, Katarzyna Marciniak, Elizabeth Nathanson, Diane Negra, Crystal Parikh, Viet Nguyen, Art Sakamoto, Gayle Sato, Yvonne Tasker, Linda Trinh Võ, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. In the process of writing and completing this project, I was also fortunate to have had the wise coun- sel of people who kindly gave advice and/or read proposals, chapters, or even the entire manuscript. Thank you to Marc Stein, Gina Herrmann, Christine Hughes, Jane Iwamura, Daniel Kim, and Min Hyoung Song for helping me complete this book. I especially want to thank Jigna Desai for being a wonderful mentor and friend, for extending her dazzling mind and generous heart. Finally, I thank Janet Francendese and the professional editorial team at Temple University Press for their fine work on this project. 1 / Asian American Women’s Popular Literature, Neoliberalism, and Cultural Citizenship In American Woman: A Novel (2003), Susan Choi fictionalizes the “miss- ing year” of unknown events following the 1974 kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical political group loosely connected to the Weather Underground Organization.1 Choi’s version features Japanese American protagonist Jenny Shimada as an antiwar activist of the militant New Left variety who has bombed a gov- ernment draft office in California and gone underground in upstate New York as Iris Wong. Soon, Jenny summons inspiration to follow her politi- cal conscience from the history of her father’s internment, draft resis- tance, and incarceration during World War II, and returns to the West Coast. While Jenny is arrested in California, she continues to explore politics in feminist separatist and cultural nationalist communities and joins her father in a pilgrimage to Manzanar. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Choi’s second novel is a bracing indictment of US imperialism, capitalism, and Orientalism that draws connections between World War II and the American war in Viet Nam, not only through an unequivocal challenge to US foreign policy and militarization in Asia but also through a condemning representa- tion of the racialization of Jenny as immutably foreign in the United States. American Woman thematizes, in fact, the orthodoxy in Asian Americanist critique that Asian Americans and especially Asian Ameri- can women are invisible in the United States as citizens or understood only as racial Other, alien, or even enemy.2 As the title implies, the novel undertakes a corrective, which it accomplishes through an excavation

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