Asian
American Subgenres, 1853-1941
Special issue of Genre:
Forms of
Discourse and Culture
This
project examines subgenres of Asian American cultural production,
American
representations of Asian Americans, and other cultural texts situated
in the
“American Pacific” between Commodore Perry’s “opening” of Japan
in 1853 and the changes in both political and aesthetic context that
took place
after the attack on Pearl Harbor
in 1941. Why was there no dominant genre of Asian American writing
before
ethnic autobiography became prominent in the 1940s with works like
Bulosan’s America
is in the Heart and Okubo’s Citizen 13360? In the century
that
preceded the public recognition and generic limits (what Claudia Tate
calls
“the protocols of race”) that characterize many post-WWII ethnic
autobiographies and Bildungsromans, what forms of discourse and
culture
were available to Asian American authors? Asking such questions will
enable not
only the recovery and analysis of relatively unexamined modes of early
Asian
American cultural production, but also the theorization of the
political and
racial conditions for the emergence and disappearance of subgenres. To
what
extent does the prefix of “subgenre” reflect the experiences of
racial
subjection, national subject formation, and the expressive
possibilities of the
subaltern?
This
collection places texts produced by Asians living in the U.S.
in the broader context of changing relationships between America
and various Asian nations throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. These transnational contexts
lend both historical and geographical specificity to studies that
analyze how
imperialism and geographically uneven development influence the
asymmetrical
circulation of texts across the contested Pacific.
Proposed topics include, but are not limited
to:
Subterranean Archives:
This section will present
innovative work on relatively unexamined archives pertinent to the
cultural
history of Asian America. Possible topics include legal records, World
Exposition exhibits, political cartoons, material culture, colonial
Hawaiian
writings, and picture brides. Essays on
underrepresented groups—such as immigrants (or non-immigrant
commentators) from
South Asia or Southeast Asia—would be especially
welcome. Many of these materials exemplify constrained sub-genres whose
expressive limitations bespeak their conditions of exile or legal
repression. Among the questions that
this section will pursue are: what ideological, economic, or
demographic
conditions hold a subgenre down? And how
can subgenres be read as dialectical critiques of the ideological and
social
conditions that determine what counts—or what succeeds—as a genre?
Multilingual/Multinational
Subgenres:
Texts
that provide points of intersection between area studies and Asian
American
studies by voicing the views and experiences of writers who merely
visited
(like Rabindranath Tagore and Yone Noguchi) or (like Hawaii
and the Philippines)
were
occupied by the U.S. Translations, with commentary, of relevant
“multi-lingual U. S.
literature”
(native commentary on American rule in the Philippines,
Chinatown newspaper
articles, correspondence relating to diplomacy or foreign policy, etc.)
would
be welcome.
Sub-Texts:
Can
there be genres without subgenres? This section will examine the ways
in which
“dominant” discourses such as Anglo-American novels, turn of the
century
world’s fairs, Imagist poetry, and racist journalism cite, simulate, or
echo
Asian American and Asiatic texts and images. Why, for example, do
Asiatics appear
so frequently—and yet so thinly—in the writings of Naturalists like
Frank
Norris and Jack London? What are the political implications of Sesue
Hayakawa’s
performances in early Hollywood
films such De Mille’s The Cheat?
Circulations:
This section examines
the various forms taken on by representations of travel and exoticism
in the
nineteenth century. Possible topics
include Bayard Taylor’s popular travel writings about China, India, and Japan, relationships between
the
Transcendentalists and Eastern philosophers, Lafcadio Hearn’s turn from
regionalist writing in New Orleans to Gothic storytelling
in Japan. How
do political and racial identities—as well as economic
necessity—determine
these authors’ choices of genre, subject matter, and audience? Do these
texts
reveal international and intercultural trajectories of influence?
Please
submit 1-2 page proposals to Hsuan L. Hsu, Visiting Scholar, American
Academy of Arts and
Sciences (hhsu@post.harvard.edu)
by October 1, 2005.
Full-length essays of 7,000-8,000 words will be due by May 1, 2006.