Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian ...American characters or contexts.Racial Asymmetriesspecifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the author's ethnoracial makeup does not directly overlap with that of the storytelling perspective.Through rigorous analysis of novels and short fiction, such as Sesshu Foster'sAtomik Aztex, Sabina Murray'sA Carnivore's Inquiryand Sigrid Nunez'sThe Last of Her Kind, Sohn reveals how the construction of narrative perspective allows the Asian American writer a flexible aesthetic canvas upon which to engage issues of oppression and inequity, power and subjectivity, and the complicated construction of racial identity. Speaking to concerns running through postcolonial studies and American literature at large,Racial Asymmetriesemploys an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds.Stephen Hong Sohnis Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. He is the co-editor ofTransnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits.
This article engages in a reading of the second chapter from Dao Strom’s novel Grass Roof, Tin Roof. The analysis is concerned with a posthuman moment: Hus Madsen, the patriarch of a Vietnamese ...American family, is accosted by a neighbor spewing racist rhetoric. This article’s title, “brainless creatures” (52), is an invocation of Hus’s conception of a hierarchy that places humans at the top and dimwitted animals at the bottom. This arrangement becomes destabilized by the chapter’s events, as Hus’s Vietnamese American family members are figured by that neighbor as subhuman, parasitic creatures. Such events reveal what Sohn denotes as a neo-yellow peril discourse, a mode of racialized storytelling that renders the Vietnamese American within an ambivalent narrative and contextual position.
This article engages in an in-depth critical reading of Julayne Lee's poetry collection, Not My White Savior (2018). It focuses on how Lee's lyrics involve forms of repetition and variation to ...institute a reparative aesthetic. The article considers Lee's historical excavation of the Korean War and the violent manifestations that have occurred since the Armistice was signed in 1953. The article proceeds with readings that cover a variety of issues, including overseas Korean adoption, the plight of single Korean mothers, the need to develop more robust models for alternative kinships, as well as the speculative tropes deployed by Lee in these various poetic depictions. Finally, the article persistently investigates poetic techniques, including the refrain and the repetend, as part of Lee's lyrical approaches. Lee's lyric project ultimately reimagines overseas adopted Koreans as a fellowship, one promoting activism and social justice.
...Yi Sang's work would be considered as having introduced key modes and concepts of Dada and surrealism into Korean literature. The final lines gesture to the figurative tension created when the ...lyric speaker cannot control the realm of the imagination, a prison-like space that becomes inhospitable to sociality and community. The reference to the Vietnam War recalls South Korea's participation in the fighting, as South Korea had agreed to provide military support to the United States. Whereas Yi Sang's poem can be read through its colonial critique of Japan, Kim's poem directly concerns South Korea's neocolonial relationship with the United States as well as its tense standoff with North Korea.5 The birds thus become a possible metaphor for South Korea, as the country continues to face internal divisions over its connection to
This article focuses on a strain of American Orientalist depiction in which a Chicano writer makes use of an Asian American minor character within the fictional world. The argument investigates why ...the Chicano author is invested in minority Orientalism as a means by which to explore the interconnectedness of Asian American and Chicano populations. The argument unfolds through an analysis of Alejandro Morales's speculative novel,The Rag Doll Plagues, which includes a hardworking and ambitious Asian American female cyborg, a figure who illustrates the tenuousness of racial inclusion. The novel further depicts how racial groups swap places in the social hierarchy. The representational terrain unveils the plasticity in the model minority configuration, as those of a specific Mexican descent become elevated above others.
Sohn takes to the originary site of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Sohn trains his focus on the living and breathing bodies that dispel the clear-cut boundaries between ideological, national, racial, ...and ethnic delineations, mapping out the liminal positionalities of the individuals who were swept up in and away by the war. Sohn's article comes from his mother's memory of a Baby Ruth candy bar that she found en route to Busan as an evacuee of war. The irony of this figurative expression, which transforms the sweet taste of the chocolate and caramel into a serendipitous encounter, despite or perhaps precisely because of its gesture to the presence of foreign forces fighting.
With its mathematical vocabulary, innovative geometrical form, lyric density, and funky deployment of punctuation, Dura exemplifies Kim's interest in poetic experimentation. This article investigates ...how Kim negotiates two foci through Dura: on the one hand, employing experimental linguistics that grant punctuation, mathematical notations, and scientific vocabulary multiple signifying possibilities, while on the other, pushing forth a political project that speaks to the continuing issue of radical social inequalities. Punctuation, mathematics, and science all operate under a rubric of efficiency. Punctuation enables more effective forms of communication, while mathematical and scientific advances enable inventions that provide greater comfort, easier transport, faster communication, and other improvements. But Kim's lyric style in Dura questions the logic of efficiency that undergirds modes of standardization and perceived trajectories of advancement. Hence, the use of experimental punctuation and nonstandard use of mathematical and scientific language enable Dura to stage a trenchant critique of driving forces behind colonialism and empire.
This article explores the growth and maturation of the protoqueer Asian American child as depicted in Alexander Chee’s debut novel Edinburgh (2001). The novel crucially intervenes in and expands ...existing discourses of childhood, offering up the possibility of alternative inheritances and mythical progenitors. Further still, the process of retrospective storytelling enacts a recovery process that situates the queer Asian American adult alongside a collective community threatened with erasure. In this sense, narrative perspective acts to reconceive social formation through a comparatively configured and asymmetrically presented chronicle of survivorships.
Draws an interpretation of minority Orientalism texts spotlights the figure of Asian or Asian American as a minor character who functions to clarify the comparative and asymmetrical nature of racial ...exclusion. In order to do so, the author explores the ways in which Alejandro Morales figures the futuristic Asian American subject within his novel The rag doll plagues (1992). IBSSMB Reprinted by permission of University of Minnesota Press
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