3 Sohn et. al's call for papers clearly echoes this early impulse; as with âAsian ...... and class conflicts which are
1 The game is not up: Reading the “Asian American” fiction Tara Fickle Dissertation Prospectus, July 2011 Please do not cite or circulate without permission (
[email protected])
“The difference between us and other pioneers, we did not come here for the gold streets. We came to play. And we’ll play again. Yes, John Chinaman means to enjoy himself all the while.” -‐Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey Introduction: The post-lapsarian crisis of Asian American Studies For approximately the last fifteen years, Asian American literary studies has considered itself to be in crisis. In 1996, Susan Koshy suggested that “radical demographic shifts produced within the Asian American community by the 1965 immigration laws” (Koshy 1996, 315) had destabilized the original coherence of the field; Asian American Studies’ ensuing lack of critical engagement with such shifts had, according to Koshy, resulted in its occupying a subordinate position in the broader field of Ethnic Studies; what differentiated it from its counterparts of Chicano, Native and African American studies was this “theoretical weakness.”1 Koshy’s anxiety over the political and academic relevance and stability of Asian American Studies has produced many echoes in the ensuing decade. Just last year, the editors of a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies entitled “Theorizing Asian American 1 The context of this claim reads as follows: “…significant scholarly energy has been directed towards editing
and introducing the works of individual or groups of Asian American authors...Certainly, some degree of effort in sponsoring the work of newer or unfamiliar writers is constructive in an emergent field, but it cannot assume a disproportionate importance... One of the consequences of this prioritization of scholarly activity has been a theoretical weakness within the field. When this problem is compounded by other conditions like the status of Asian American literature as an emergent field, and the enormous demand among readers and teachers of American literature for guidance in interpreting this literature, it becomes clearer why the influence of the few critical texts to undertake an analysis of the entire field has been so great. Thus, often inadvertently, these evaluations have assumed a canon-‐forming power” (Koshy 1996, 324, emphasis mine).
2
Fiction” lamented the fact that “literary critics have avoided defining and categorizing what exactly hallmarks, embodies, and characterizes Asian American literature” (Sohn et al. 2010, 1), signaling the difficulty of defining the field if a coherent Asian American community could no longer be identified. At the same time, the editors were clearly wary of falling into the essentialist trap of locating the embodiment of Asian American literature in a biological entity called “an Asian American.” Thus, their initial call for papers asks, “If existing rubrics of Asian American literature problematically collect texts under the eye of biology, what other ways might Asian Americanists approach, categorize, and consider their objects of study?” The editors attempt to transcend the limitations of defining race as a biological category, but their method of widening that classification relies on an essentialism of a paradoxical nature: not a singular object of study, but a singular type of practitioner, the “Asian Americanist,” is imagined to exist before the literary text does. Much Asian American criticism has found itself trapped in a version of this tautology, which, if it does not attempt to dismiss the author’s biology in favor of their politics or aesthetics only to re-‐locate the Asian American body in the academic, it tends towards a disciplinary essentialism, which substitutes a biological body for an institutional one. Certainly the diversity of post-‐1965 Asian immigrants presents a critical conundrum that encourages a turn away from biology: in terms of class, language, point of origin and political affiliation, the population has greatly inflated, perhaps to breaking point, the spectrum of those “objects of study” with which Asian American Studies must grapple. But this would assume that the term “Asian American,” and subsequently “Asian American Literature,” was even at its inception a stable point of reference. Such an assumption clearly underlies Koshy’s critique, and even those critics who suggest a turn away from a
3
conception of Asian American Studies as the study of Asian Americans – Kandice Chuh’s call for a “subjectless discourse” comes immediately to mind -‐ seem to believe that there was indeed a moment, perhaps in the political foment of the 1960s during which the term first came into being, when “Asian American” was a meaningful referent and identifiable subject-‐position, if not for the object of study, at least for the studiers.2 Yet one need only consider a few of the early anthologies of Asian American literature, the immediate material consequences of the term “Asian American”’s academic legitimization, to topple the fantasy of a golden age. David Hsin-‐Fu Wand’s Asian American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (1974), which was published just before -‐ and has subsequently been overshadowed by -‐ the infamous Aiiieeeee!, opens with the “existential question: What is an Asian-‐American?” (Wand 2). The inquiry is significant to Wand insofar as it raises the question of who counts as an Asian American author – “Are only second-‐generation, third-‐generation, and fourth-‐generation Chinese brought up in the States Asian-‐Americans? … Should we include…writers who publish exclusively in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Tagalog?” (Wand 2-‐3).3 Wand’s concerns do not extend to what counts as Asian American content -‐ in fact suggesting that there is no specific Asian American content, a contention reiterated by Colleen Lye thirty years later when she claimed that “there is no Asian American aesthetic” (Lye 2008) -‐ or what counts as literature in the first place; rather, his questions circulate in the nebulous sphere of authorial identity. Ultimately, he takes refuge in the formal quality of the texts – their voice 2 An upcoming course to be taught at UC Berkeley by Colleen Lye, a prominent critic Asian of American
literature, entitled “What Was Asian American Literature?”, takes its cue from Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? in presupposing, too, that some body of texts identifiable as “Asian American Literature” also once existed. 3 Sohn et. al’s call for papers clearly echoes this early impulse; as with “Asian Americanists,” the turn to the “Asian American author” must consider the body of the writer or critic as the determining criteria, rather than the content of the writing or the object of study.
4
– and concludes that “[c]ontemporary Asian-‐American writing has many distinct and eloquent voices” (Wand 22). What Wand ends up doing, in other words, is invoking the synthetic fantasy of the very term whose endless diversity caused him such difficulty in the first place, suggesting that the question (“What is an Asian-‐American?”) can be resolved by the process of anthologization (and canonization, though he does not use the word), which for him consists of conducting a barrage of disparate voices into a harmonic arrangement, such that the rumblings of internal difference somehow resolve themselves into a chorus rather than a cacophony. Later that year, Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong’s anthology of Asian American literature, Aiiieeeee!, grappled with the same “existential” question by taking an essentially ethnographic approach. The first sentence of the preface reads, “Asian Americans are not one people but several – Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and Filipino Americans.” (Chan et al. 1974, xi) Adopting an anthropological distance, the editors invoke the spectre of racial essentialism – the all-‐ encompassing label of “Oriental” that historically lumped together all Asians as “one people” – which the newly coined “Asian American” was created to banish. From the outset, then, the reader is reminded that the process of self-‐identification for a racial subject is always in danger of reinscribing the process of identification by others (and, in its reduced form, stereotyping4). The editors attempt to subvert this danger by resorting, as Wand did, to voice: “Asian America, so long ignored and forcibly excluded from creative participation in American culture, is wounded, sad…and this is his AIIIEEEEE!!! It is more than a whine,
4 which is, in a sense, what Asian Americanists do by identifying certain representations in Asian American
literature as more “authentic” than others; see Mark Chiang’s discussion of positive stereotypes in The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies, to be discussed further.
5
shout, or scream. It is fifty years of our whole voice” (xii). The rhetorical strategy here is more complex than Wand’s, though; it involves the imagining of Asian America, a national body politic, which is at first rendered masculine and then not so much a body as a mouth, a mouth whose utterance is not word but sound, and then not simply sound but voice. What began in Wand as a chorus of voices has now fused into a singular shriek of aesthetic expression. This impressive image, however, still fails to resolve the incoherence of the term “Asian American”; what it does instead is substitute the incoherence of the term with the incoherence of the cry. Seventeen years after the publication of Aiiieeeee!, the editors added a second preface to the newly released “Mentor Edition.” Again they invoke the metaphor of Asian America as a national body, but they are quick to introduce an alternate nomenclature – “yellows” – to reinforce the possibility of coherence. The term “yellows,” in my opinion, is intended to reanimate the political affiliations with African Americans which initially galvanized the 1970s Asian American Studies movement (initially part of the Third World Liberation Front), and in recalling this interracial alliance, to seek an interchangeability between Asian American and “yellow” that seemed to have been effortlessly achieved between African American and “black” (and, for that matter, American and “white”).5 The 1991 preface ends by identifying not only yellow authors and critics, but readers as well, as the constituent parts of “Asian America,” with the editors at the head of an expedition into that country “to find the readers and the writers who together made Asian American 5 Such a strategy is of course familiar to many minority movements, in which a previously pejorative term is
“reclaimed” for the purpose of empowering self-‐identification. What is interesting is that, whereas this process appears to have been so successful in the institutionalization of a field like Queer studies, the attempt to do the same with “yellow” failed in short order, perhaps because it existed simultaneously with “Asian American.”
6
literature” (Chan et al. 1991, xli).6 Such a rhetorical move personifies the individual ethnicities (Chinese, Japanese, etc.) that have aggregated into the pan-‐ethnic designation “Asian American,” implying that the lateral relationships between those sub-‐groups can be metaphorically understood as the interactions between reader, writer, and critic, each acting as a type of representative “constituency” in the Asian American body politic. The anxiety over what (or who) is Asian American, and what is (or was) Asian American literature, clearly first became articulable through the process of canonization and anthologization, for any attempt to group and introduce the texts automatically called attention to the difficulty of finding a common thread beyond that which was handed down by governmental and social discourses. Perhaps it was the proliferation of available “Asian American” texts to choose from that made this task difficult from the very beginning, and the fact that one could make a choice at all implied that perhaps the term “Asian American literature” was already too small to account for the unwieldy largeness of the material products that it culled from. Far from being able to focus on the conversation between texts, or what was being said within them, the presiding concern for Asian American literary anthologies was over who was being excluded from the discussion, who was being denied a voice – in effect, rehearsing the impossibility of a single text to represent any particular group, and the impossibility of “Asian American” to represent all of the individual ethnicities under its aegis. That synecdochical relationship, which is essential to the project of canonization more generally, presaged the academic debates over minority literature in the larger canon of 20th-‐century American fiction taught in American schools
6 Like Sohn and others, Wong et. al’s claim here clearly attempts to retroactively insist upon a history for
Asian American literature, suggesting that it is already in place at the time of anthologization, rather than recognizing that anthologization itself, or the formation of a readership, is responsible for this invention.
7
that became the focus of John Guillory’s Cultural Capital, a text which I intend to explore further to help clarify the position of Asian American and ethnic literature vis-‐à-‐vis generic convention. Research Question: Playing the “Asian American” game By failing to interrogate the ways in which both parts of the appellation “Asian American” function as synecdochic fictions, numerous critics of Asian American literature, and Asian American Studies more broadly, have tended to focus too strongly on the second term. For example, David Palumbo-‐Liu’s well-‐received Asian/America opens with the following contention: “…the persistent deferral of the status of ‘American’ to ‘hyphenated’ Americans…begs the question of the precise constitution of the totality presumed to inhere beneath the signifier ‘American’” (Palumbo-‐Liu 1999, 1). The implication is that the critical project of Asian American Studies should be to lay bare the processes by which such a totality has become invisible; in other words, the historical events which have masked the simultaneity of “white” and “American” which the editors of Aiiieeeee! responded to with their use of the term “yellows.”
But what about the totality presumed to inhere beneath the signifier “Asian”? By
asking this question, I am not trying to be facetious or, for that matter, particularly critical of work like Palumbo-‐Liu’s, the relevance of which is indisputable for establishing a historical understanding of Asian racial formation. However, it is clear to me that, just as we have falsely assumed the existence of Asian American bodies – be they individual physiologies, bodies of literature, or body politics – we have also too easily accepted the existence of something called “Asia,” simply because it appears to be the lowest common
8
denominator among Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Indians, Mongolians, Malays, etc. etc. etc. In reality, there is no place called “Asia.” There is no singular point on a map which one can point to; it merely serves as spatial shorthand for an aggregate mass of continuous land which we call a continent. While I am not well-‐versed in the historical processes by which the naming of the continents occurred, it appears logical to assume that the name “Asia” originally indexed an undifferentiated conglomeration of space, the internally-‐drawn boundaries of which, to early European explorers, were considered mostly arbitrary and, until trading relations and colonization began in earnest, remained semantically irrelevant. What I am attempting to draw our attention to, through this seeming tangent, is that the term “Asian” is as much a totalizing fiction as “American” is, a cartographic fantasy of continuity and contiguity that must always occur in order to draw even the most rudimentary map. The fact that “Asiatics” became a legal classification by way of eugenics (a process which is well-‐narrated by Palumbo-‐Liu) tends to impress an apparently biological truth-‐value upon the term, such that race is real because space is real. In this sense, any critical engagement with the problems that crop up when organizing a field of study around biology (as Sohn et. al were concerned with) must, I think, also consider the ways in which cartography is the original fiction which underlies biological determinism. In other words, map-‐making and body-‐making are both attempts at fictional representation which always seem to point to a material reality, be it a tract of land or a strand of DNA, but which in fact rely upon a fictional correlation between part and whole. Examining the logical, rather than merely legal, contradictions and abstractions required to create the term “Asian American” seems to me a useful point of departure for a
9
new body of Asian American critical studies which highlights the multiplicity of discursive fictions behind the term’s application to institutional or physical bodies. A theoretical work which I find useful in this respect is Mark Chiang’s The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies. For me, the theoretical power of Chiang’s analysis arises from his application of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital and institutional practice to Asian American Studies. Arguing that “Asian American” should be seen as a form of symbolic capital which accrues to those who identify as such, Chiang convincingly rewrites the traditional narrative of the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies (of which the Asian American Studies department was a product) beginning at San Francisco State University in 1967/8. He suggests that the protesters’ call for representation, which has generally been understood as a desire to make visible the so-‐called marginalized histories and suppressed voices of ethnic minorities, or, in other words, as a demand to see those histories represented alongside a “master narrative” of American history in higher education, can be more productively understood as the goal to establish an institutional conduit for the accumulation of a specific form of cultural capital. Thus, the present crisis and “theoretical weakness” of Asian American Studies is helpfully clarified by Chiang to be a consequence of the “weakly institutionalized status of Asian American Studies” (Chiang 2009, 15). The reason hinges upon the paradoxical relationship that the term “Asian American” has with representation: unlike political representation, which at least nominally depends on the election of a representative by their constituency, one simply “chooses” to call oneself, and hence becomes, an Asian American, meaning that the resulting community of Asian Americans is essentially the product of a self-‐legitimating politics of recognition (a process which relies on, and is thus
10
dangerously close to, the essentializing function that the earlier term “Oriental” served). Chiang clarifies the positions that Wand and Chan et al. staked out nearly forty years ago by suggesting that
disparate individuals and groups are held together under the Asian American designation only by an interest. This interest, however, is not a “common” one insofar as that implies a unitary and homogeneous subject. Instead, it is a competitive interest signifying by acting against but also with others in the pursuit of some object or end, which in this instance is the specific capital of the Asian American field, or what I call the political capital of representation. (Chiang 2009, 14, emphasis original)
This passage offers a way to render intelligible the chorus of voices or incoherent cry of “Asian American,” what Frank Chin made explicit when he asked, “What holds the Asian Americas together, right now, at about half past dead? Aiiieeeee!”7 The scream can now be read as the frustrated desire for a stake in the cultural economy, frustrated not simply because it has been denied representation, but because the desire is itself agonistic (competitive). “Aiiieeeee!,” and, equally, “Asian American,” faces theoretical or institutional weakness precisely because the utterance constantly rehearses the fragility of the bonds which create communal identity, fragile because the strategic essentialism required for group representation must continually suppress the antagonism of individual difference that threatens to erupt. By defining the process of becoming or creating an “Asian American” as agonistic (agon, the root morpheme in “antagonism” and like words, is the Greek term for “the contest for the prize at the games” [Oxford English Dictionary], its original meaning of “gathering or assembly” having undergone semantic narrowing via its association with gaming arenas), we can read the interplay of the terms “Asian” and “American” – a 7 Chin, “Come all ye Asian American Writers of the Real and Fake” in The Big Aiiieeeee!, 1991, p.92.
11
combination which is in the first place by no means natural or uncontested, and the mid-‐ 1990s saw many attempts to decide how to most accurately formulate it, whether as hyphenated, unhyphenated, or with solidus (cf. Palumbo-‐Liu, Asian/America) – as itself an exercise in competition. Failing to recognize that the formation of a racial identity like “Asian American” is fundamentally a play on words, a play with words like “yellow” meant to suppress other words like “Oriental,” “Jap,” or “gook,” obscures the fact that the discursive processes surrounding institutionalization of all sorts, be it of an academic department or of racism itself, in many ways resembles the playing of a game. To talk about Asian American literature in terms of gaming is not to denounce it as a trivial pursuit, and neither is it an imposition of cynicism upon the texts, as if to criticize the authors for “playing up” their Asian Americanness to the publishing world. I want to emphasize a point that J. Huizinga, the earliest theorist of game theory and modern culture, himself made: that many games are not immediately apparent as “play,” for they are usually very serious indeed, but that “fun” and “game” are not perfect translations of one another; indeed, seriousness is often an index of the absorptive capacity of a game, rather than an indication of its “playfulness.” A universal byproduct of institutionalization is the creation of game spaces, and the way in which we understand institutions is clear from the way in which we speak of them: one “plays by the rules” of institutions, be they legally explicit or socially implied. Indeed, the syntax of game-‐play is sometimes the only way that we can articulate a subject’s interaction with institutional sites, to the point that an idiomatic phrase like, “One must play the game to get ahead” ceases to have metaphorical power and appears to be simply a cliché. I do not think it a great leap of logic to suggest, then, that institutions can in part be
12
defined by their ability to elide easy literalization, instead forcing those within the system to utilize the diction of games and play to represent all aspects of that system. Essentially, the subject is invited, if not actually encouraged, to see himself as a game player, to wholly focus his attention on the seemingly endless range of choices and decisions that can help him “climb the ladder,” “beat the boss at his own game,” or “win respect” from his fellows. It seems to me that institutions most successfully achieve this by disguising through various means (not least of which can be seen in the conversion of economic capital into its immaterial forms), the ways in which “choice” is a fiction: a player might move to any position he wishes, but the one move he cannot make is the one that would take him beyond the game itself. Whether games can be understood as small-‐scale precursors for institutions (cf. Huizinga), or if our obsession with games is the consequence of institutionalization (cf. Caillois and Baudrillard), the two have, in the current moment, become mutually constitutive, such that modern man sees no contradiction between, on the one hand, “making a game” out of accomplishing the mundane tasks of daily life, and at the same time spending one’s free time planting virtual seeds, harvesting virtual crops, and hiring virtual laborers; in other words, playing a game like “Farmville” or its hundreds of spin-‐offs. Indeed, the two activities are simply mirror images of one another: both seek to “make work fun,” and the only thing which distinguishes them is the amount of energy required to maintain the fictional boundaries or “virtuality” of the game. The relevance of this state of affairs for the current project exists in understanding racial formation as an institutional byproduct which can itself find articulation only in terms of games. The most obvious example of this is the accusation that one is “playing the
13
race card.” A literal translation of this phrase cannot be rendered without reproducing the metaphor of race as a representation on the level of the game piece or playing card – in essence, we cannot understand race at all, or for that matter attempt to dismiss it, without falling back upon its supposed materiality, whether that be biological or social. Anne Cheng, in The Melancholy of Race, draws attention to this conundrum: Holding a “full deck” may imply some idealized version of multisubjectivity (that is, the potential to play the race card, the gender card, the immigrant card, and so forth), but it also implies a state of mental health and completion that renders such playing unnecessary in the first place. One would “play” a card only because one is already outside the larger game, for to play a card is to exercise the value of one’s disadvantage, the liability that is asset. The paradox doubles: the one who plays with a full deck not only need not play at all but indeed has no such “card” to play. Only those playing with less than a full deck need apply. (Cheng 2001, 103, emphasis original) The racialized subject emerges, in Cheng’s argument, as spectator, which is no surprise; in her version of the metaphor, “spectator” is synonymous with “Other.” But it is precisely the way in which she characterizes the behavior of this spectator which belies an attempt to fuse race and mental state into the singular metaphor of the playing card; to participate, as a spectator, is to break the illusion of the game’s sacred boundaries, and the consequence is to appear deluded oneself, like a bystander leaning forward to place a domino on the table in the middle of a poker game. Ultimately, her logic distorts the metaphor by failing to acknowledge the central image with all of its self-‐contained rules, rules which appear contradictory when transposed literally onto the real world. More to the point, there can be no “outside” the game, because the social world is itself a game; if the racialized subject has been encouraged to see herself as a spectator, she is still only given meaning in relation to
14
that game, whether or not she is required to imagine herself as an outsider looking in, a viewer who takes vicarious pleasure in occupying a bird’s eye view.8 What has hopefully become clear by this point is that the reasons behind the creation of “Asian American” as a term, and its subsequent institutionalization as “Asian American Studies,” are nearly identical to the reasons that games are played in the first place. As Roger Caillois has pointed out, the essential feature common to all conventional games is that they seek to nullify all forms of advantage. In both games of pure skill and those of pure chance, what Caillois respectively refers to as alea and agon, the decisive purpose of the game is to make all players exactly equal or, in other words, to make the game completely fair: “…all must play with exactly the same possibility of proving their superiority or, on another scale, exactly the same chances of winning” (Caillois 1961, 19). And this is precisely the same desire underwriting the logic of civil rights and socialist ideology: the attempt to nullify unfair advantage, which in this case can be defined as racial or class privilege. The goal of establishing minority rights has always been to give everyone an equal chance -‐ to, as they say, “level the playing field” such that being born white or rich is not a boon -‐ and in doing so eliminating social stratification arising from biological determinism. We can also see the extent to which academic institutionalization is invested in this rhetoric of “fair play.” As Huizinga, Caillois and others point out, a seeming peculiarity of many games, particularly mental ones like crosswords or mazes, is that they contain no 8 This is another way of phrasing W.E.B. DuBois’ concept of “double consciousness”; in this case, one sees
oneself not as abjected other, but as spectator, at the same time that one watches the game being played. An exit strategy might appear to be seeing the game as a game – seeing “through” the game (cf. Seltzer’s “Parlor Games”) – but such a process of recognition is already built into the structure of the game itself and, in fact, is required to become a successful player.
15
material stakes beyond personal satisfaction. This is the condition Caillois calls ludus, the imposed “ruleness” of games which disciplines and complements paidia, which he considers to be the spontaneous exuberance and turbulence which characterizes the play of children (the term paidia is Greek for child-‐rearing or education). Thus, the ultimate expression of ludus is “the pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed for this purpose…so that reaching a solution has no other goal than personal satisfaction for its own sake” (Caillois 1961, 29).9 Whereas most critics tend to refer to all forms of gameplay as “ludic,” Caillois’ helpful distinction allows us to better see the connection between ludus and institutionalization, as well as to posit a framework in which the specific types of game spaces created by institutionalization (as I spoke of earlier) are ludic in design, which allow for expressions of paidia only within their boundaries. Bernard Suits, whose extremely influential book The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (1978) continues to be a driving force behind contemporary game theory criticism, clarifies this connection further when he defines a game as “a system of reciprocally enabling moves whose purpose is the continued operation of the system” (Suits 1978, 135). Insofar as we can understand academic institutions to be social systems, this definition of games is perfectly transportable into our discussion of Asian American Studies. What Koshy and others have seen as a crisis of representation I see as a series of “reciprocally enabling moves” – publication, pedagogy and intellectual exchange – which are not merely concerned with the seeming impossibility 9 This insight also highlights the fictionality of play itself, in that most games tend to contain within them (and
in fact can ultimately be traced to) a narrative which explains their limits and their choices of representation. For example, in the game of chess, the monarchical narrative gives the pieces their names, as is evident not only with the queen and king, but also the fact that “knights” are fashioned to resemble horses, which can “jump” around on the board.
16
of defining an object of study. Rather, the field itself depends on the indeterminacy -‐ or undecideability, or whatever one wishes to call it – of the term “Asian American.” That term’s incoherence is in fact what allows for the perpetuation of Asian American Studies itself.
Games are thus implicated in the various processes of representation that allow us
to articulate racial formation and to perceive its perpetuation through institutional means. Of particular interest to a literary analysis of games is a tertiary function, what I will loosely term “character development.” This is an area of inquiry that draws on social anthropology, cognitive psychology, and performance theory, and will elucidate the ways in which “Asian American” can be productively understood as not only an institutional byproduct or an equalizing force but as “character” itself.
The liminality of game spaces is the force behind much of their ability to function as
character development. Developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, liminality refers to “in-‐between situations and conditions that are characterized by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty regarding the continuity of tradition and future outcomes”.10 It provides a useful model for studying “events or situations that involve the dissolution of order, but which are also formative of institutions and structures”11; in other words, game spaces. As suggested earlier, games are characterized by their simultaneous perpetuation and destruction of institutional inequalities, and this is in many cases achieved through the fiction of choice or chance. Perceiving gamespaces as rites of passage (tribal rites of passage were the source of van 10 Agnes Horvath, Bjørn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra, “Liminality and Cultures of Change,” International
Political Anthropology (3), 2009. Also see Turner (1982) and van Gennep (1960). 11 Arpad Szakolczai, “Liminality and Experience: Structuring transitory situations and transformative events,” International Political Anthropology (3), 2009.
17
Gennep’s initial formulation of preliminal, liminal, and postliminal stages) allows us to investigate the ways in which they develop various forms of character and identity through their encouragement of role-‐playing.
Augusto Boal offers an initial point of affinity between role-‐playing and games, for
he identifies the birth of modern theater in the figure of Thespis of Icaria, the 6th-‐century B.C. actor said to be the first to ever “play a character” rather than speak as himself on stage. Attempting to directly address the Athenian statesman Solon, who was that day in attendance, Thespis broke from his place in the Chorus in the midst of the performance and delivered a monologue outlining his political views. In doing so, “[w]ithout realising it, Thespis had created the Protagonist, the Proto, the First, the one who stands alone, the one who rebels, thinks and acts for himself – without mimesis, without mimicry, without imitating anyone” (Boal 2008, xiii). After being chastised and threatened for this outburst, Thespis “invented disguise: the Mask (this, which looks like me, is not me, it is another – it is the Character)” which revolutionized the stage and cleaved the actor’s body: “Actor and Character, previously one and the same, were now separated and made into two: Man and Mask” (xiv).
This cleavage is, of course, built upon the fundamentals of gameplay. The term
“protagonist” returns us to the root of agon itself, for an agonist is literally “a combatant in the games” (Oxford English Dictionary). In this case, the game is theater; more specifically, it is the playing of a role which is not, strictly speaking, one’s “real” self. The effects of this new game institution are in a sense paradoxical: on the one hand, the adoption of a mask and the mimetic process of inhabiting a character allow for an eschewal of responsibility, a
18
“hiding behind” the mask. This submergence of the personality and the self in the institution of performance underscores the absorptive capacity of games as mentioned earlier: one also “loses oneself in the game,” whether through serious concentration or by “leaving to chance” all future outcomes.12
On the other hand, as Bakhtin’s study of Carnival makes clear, the submergence of
personality can be liberatory, which is another way of saying that the rules of a game paradoxically provide for freeplay. In the case of performative games or aesthetic ones like poetry, this freedom is, quite interestingly, often described in the same terms that early anthologizers of Asian American literature used. For example, a 2008 poetry collection by four Japanese female poets working in the tradition of renshi, a collaborative process of linked verse in which one poet builds upon a line given by the previous poet, is tellingly titled “No Choice but to Follow.” Excerpts from an interview with the four women after the poem’s completion read as follows: “Taking part in the renshi took me out of my element…I felt I was being thrown into the unknown, addressing topics I usually don’t write about, so there was a need to be more creative.” (Inoshita in Oda, emphasis mine) “…I felt I had to step up my writing and not to emulate, but to find my own voice in this project” (Passion in Oda, emphasis mine). Here, rigidity of aesthetic form produces, indeed necessitates, freedom of aesthetic content, but it also apparently allows for a reconfiguration of what we think of as characteristically formal devices like tone and voice.
12 In fact, both can exist simultaneously. Boal suggests that the way to achieve “liberation” is by transforming
the audience member from spectator to actor (“Spect-‐actor”), which first requires a freeing of the body that can be best achieved through the playing of parlour games like charades. See Theatre of the Oppressed, p.106-‐ 7.
19
Games as institutions also provide for a second type of “character development”
beyond the aesthetic and performative realms. Cognitive psychologists, beginning with Jean Piaget in the 1930s, have taken particular interest in the way that games serve pedagogical and moralizing functions for children, suggesting that a child’s coming to respect and play by the rules of a game is a literal metaphor for her coming to respect and play by the moral and legal rules of society. As Piaget puts it, “[a]ll morality consists in a system of rules, and the essence of morality is to be sought for in the respect which the individual acquires for these rules” (Piaget 1932, 1). Thus we can speak of the ethical dimensions of a game both in terms of the negative ethical consequences of game playing (as in the denunciation of gambling as vice) as well as a positive ethical development understood to emerge from the game’s pedagogical function.
For this project, Piaget’s major contribution is his insight that moral development
and a consciousness of games proceed along the same path; that is, in evolutionary stages from infancy to eleven or twelve years of age. In their nascent forms, moral and play sensibilities emerge in the motor stage, in which an infant neither comprehends the rule system nor senses the possibility for collective play. Between the ages of two and five, the egocentric stage is reached, and the child dimly grasps the force of rules but continues to play for and by himself. Once at the incipient cooperation stage (seven to eight years of age), rules are grasped as indisputable forces of law, and the subsequent desire is to unify those rules into a cooperative system that allows for multiple players – and hence the possibility of winning and losing. The final developmental stage, reached three to four years hence, involves a codification of rules, and the child proceeds from his earlier relationship of heteronomy with the rules to one of partial autonomy, recognizing that
20
rules are not immutable but are in place to allow for collective play, and also that rules must constantly be ratified and accepted by the players in order for the game to continue.13
This micro-‐schema of cognitive development underscores some of our earlier
arguments; namely, that an awareness of the fictionality of games and rules, rather than a mindless idolatry of them, constitutes the basic character of a game player. Further, games serve as a sort of production-‐line conveyor belt in which the infant (or, in game terms, the non-‐participant) is built up into a cognitive framework which fundamentally relies on the vocabulary of the game to create a “well-‐adjusted” subject. We could call this the “laboratory effect” of games, in which the stages of experimenting with rules and eventually assimilating them produces, by providing given roles and regulations for play, an institutionalized social life.
It is worth noting, however, that Piaget’s analysis tends to flatten differences
between the various subjects that get produced in this fashion. Carol Gilligan has critiqued the gender differences that both reflect and reproduce varying responses to games (and, subsequently, distinct moral developments); in doing so, she draws our attention to the way in which games can themselves produce gender (and other) roles. Gilligan attacks Lawrence Kohlberg’s well-‐known theory of stages of moral development, which closely followed Piaget’s methods, for its naturalization of male cognitive development and subsequent subordination of female psychology as less “morally developed.” She replays key moments from Kohlberg’s “Heinz experiments,” in which an eleven-‐year-‐old boy (Jack) and girl (Amy) were separately asked to respond to a moral dilemma in which “a man
13 For a full explanation of these stages, see Piaget, The Moral Development of Children, particularly pages 16-‐
69.
21
named Heinz considers whether or not to steal a drug which he cannot afford to buy in order to save the life of his wife” (Gilligan 1982, 2). The question, “Should Heinz steal the drug?” receives markedly different responses from Jake and Amy; essentially, in Kohlberg’s analysis, Jake gives the “correct” answer that Heinz should steal the drug, while Amy suggests alternatives like taking out a loan from the bank.
While at first it might seem that Amy, given that she condemns stealing as an
immoral act, should have emerged from the experiment as the child further along in moral stages of development, Kohlberg in fact places her far behind Jack. The moral stages, as summarized by Gilligan, proceed from “a three-‐level progression from an egocentric understanding of fairness based on individual need (stages one and two), to a conception of fairness anchored in the shared conventions of societal agreement (stages three and four), and finally to a principled understanding of fairness that rests on the free-‐standing logic of equality and reciprocity (stages five and six).” (Gilligan 1982, 3) According to Gilligan, Jake (stages three to four) trumps Amy (stages two to three) because of Kohlberg’s inability to perceive the value of the female approach to the dilemma, which she terms “an ethic of care” (Gilligan 1982, 5) that is unintelligible when the sign of successful moral development is a child who has achieved “a favorable balance of industry over inferiority – competent, sure of himself, and knowing well the rules of the game” (3). What has been overlooked, beginning with Freud’s characterization of the female psyche as primarily narcissistic, is the potentially reparative value in Amy’s introspective response: “…if this turning inward is construed against a background of continuing connection, it signals a new responsiveness to the self, an expansion of care rather than a failure of relationship” (Gilligan 1982, 10).
22
What has emerged from the preceding discussion that is interesting to me is not that
female psychological responses to male-‐formulated situations are generally denigrated, either because the male perspective has been normalized as the status quo or because rationality and logic appear above emotion and compromise on the gendered social hierarchy: we already know this. What is intriguing, however, is that this hierarchy can be made transparent through games, and that gender emerges as a distinct identity only once it is understood as the playing of a role. Thus, the development of “moral character” can be understood as a corollary to the character development described by Boal, in which one essentially comes to claim an identity by way of playing a game. Furthermore, it reminds us that games are implicated in questions of choice and responsibility on both an ethical and a technical level: “following the rules” resonates at both ethical and formal tenors. Significance of the Project: Reading by the rules While I am aware that “literature” appears to have dropped completely out of the preceding section’s discussion, I hope that it is now clear why this notion of an “Asian American” fiction lends itself to an analysis of Asian American fiction. If we can agree that literary criticism depends on a definition of minority literature as the place where an object of study studies itself (which would explain why the first Asian American anthologies mentioned earlier were so intent on letting the authors “speak for themselves”), then we can also say that literature produces and reproduces the dialectic of represented (or reflective) object and representative (or reflecting) institution. It does so in the same way that any game narrates itself through being played, and it accomplishes this feat by serving as a scale model for the world, as an institution that provides a temporary reality and set of
23
formal rules for the drama of racial identity to be “played out” through aesthetic labor. In other words, we can twin the projects of politicizing and aestheticizing race by understanding that both are ways to make race playable. In the former, one can “play the race card”; in the latter, as I suggest in my chapter breakdowns, aesthetics is the arena where one plays with, and at, being “Asian American.”14 The four types of games/institutions that I propose to analyze mark not only the various strategic functions of literary works, but also different configurations of forms of capital, and therefore offer several perspectives from which to view the ways in which capital can be variously stratified and distributed according to the rules and logic of the game. The fundamental framework for the project, then, is Bourdieuian in nature, for I find Chiang’s use of Bourdieu very convincing, and think that it is productive to demonstrate, as he did by using the academic institutionalization of Asian American Studies as a way to theorize race as a field, the way in which the institution of the game becomes a crucial way for racial minorities to interface with the larger juridical and social structures from which they are excluded due to legal and linguistic barriers and, through “playing,” produce various permutations of identification and representation. In order to apply Bourdieu to Asian American literary games, certain assumptions in his theory must be revised. Whereas Bourdieu suggests that the three guises of capital – 14 Which is why it makes sense that performance studies has become such an enormous sub-‐field within
Asian American Studies, and also why some of the most well-‐known Asian American literary texts are dramatic ones (in particular, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Frank Chin’s Year of the Dragon) and some of the most well-‐received Asian Americans are comedians (Margaret Cho). At the same time, dramatic performances tends to occupy an intermediate position that spans the academy and popular culture, which means that it is often staged in arenas that are self-‐defined as Asian American (political) community institutions. At the same time, I think that the status of literature for Asian American Studies and English departments differs widely from that of performance, and my focus in this project will mainly be prose and poetry, rather than dramaturgy, mainly because it seems to me that “play” has been severely underrepresented in Asian American literary criticism.
24
economic, cultural and social – are institutionalized in the forms of property rights, educational qualifications, and a title of nobility, respectively (Bourdieu 1986, 16), in my analysis the historical denial of property rights for Asians means that the liquidity of economic capital, rather than its institutionalization, becomes the primary motivation for playing gambling games; secondarily, that social capital in the form of title tends to be similarly unattainable,15 so that the alternate form of institutionalization becomes that of skill or craft, namely in the form of the professional gambler or artist; and finally, that the generational and class conflicts which are the focus of many of the texts tend to center around the disagreement over what constitutes legitimate cultural capital rather than wasteful energy, so that the concept of game-‐play, particularly in the form of aesthetic expression, helps us recognize the way in which the institutionalization of cultural capital is often divided along racial, national and generational lines.16 I have chosen to focus mostly on canonized works not because they are, or should be, accepted a priori as “Asian American” texts, but rather because the historical conditions of their reception and integration into the curriculum suggest that they are the primary artifacts around which the very concept of “Asian American” has attempted to define and legitimate itself. If we continually ask the question, “Is this or that book an Asian American text?”, we can only arrive at the unsatisfying conclusion that Wand, Chin and many others came to before us, inevitable because it assumes that there is a singular source of validation 15 Clearly, titles of nobility are not as relevant in the American context, so in my sense of the term refers more
generally to hereditary wealth that is apparent in the “big names” of the wealthy or established. 16 In minority literature this becomes especially apparent, because of the relatively consistent depiction of immigrant characters as universally working-‐class once they come to America, despite their social standings in Asia.
25
that can produce a definitive “yes” or “no.”17 Instead, I ask the questions – “What has this text contributed to the making of ‘Asian American’?” and “How does this text play with the very possibility of being, and continuing to be, (an) ‘Asian American’?” – that will hopefully help us understand the mutually constitutive process by which racial identity and representation comes into being. Furthermore, the concept of an Asian American canon as such provides further insight into the curious institutional game that has been played which makes “winners” of some texts and “losers” out of others. There appear to be three distinct arenas in which a text by an Asian-‐raced author is put into competition with its counterparts. I find this idea to be most succinctly illustrated by way of Figure 1. Text encounters
Institution Publishing industry Asian Am. Dept. English Dept.
Stakes Status “Is it a good read?” which Bestseller produces Asian American fiction “Is it Asian American?” “Is it literature?” Literary work Figure 1. Three institutions of judgment which asks,
While many excellent books have been written on the historical process of canon formation, little (that I am aware of) has been written on the fact that two texts with very similar content often have vastly different luck in this game. For example, while Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, in addition to winning the National Book Critics Circle Award, is supposedly “the most commonly taught text in modern university education,”18 Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club continues to be a 17 And, further, that such a structure of formal rules is in fact desirable.
18 This is taken from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_Warrior), which cites the Modern
Language Association as evidence for the claim, though I have not actually been able to locate a specific MLA publication which attests to it.
26
massive bestseller but, as far as I know, never appears on a twentieth-‐century American fiction university course syllabus.19 One can argue that Kingston’s text is more sophisticated and experimental than Tan’s, but, as I suggest in my analyses of the two, there is little textual evidence to support this aesthetic judgment. Furthermore, it is often forgotten that Frank Chin, in his infamous excoriation of The Woman Warrior, directed his vitriolic criticism against three books – Woman Warrior, The Joy Luck Club, and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter – but simply elaborated most fully on the first, and received a lengthy rejoinder only from Kingston. Thus, Asian American Studies’ “reciprocally enabling moves” are clearly, in the first place, intended to secure a definition of Asian American literature, but it is unclear precisely what the formal criteria and historical circumstances of this process of selection actually are. In the current moment, we can also see this process being interrogated by those authors defined as Asian American by any of the three institutions, which suggests that the identities of “author” and “Asian American” are sometimes uneasy bedfellows, because these authors perceive the racial/political label as one which potentially denigrates their skill by, in essence, hyphenating them. Thus, an interview with Chang-‐Rae Lee that appeared in the Kartika Review (a relatively prestigious Asian American literary journal) ended on a fairly awkward note: ZILKA: What advice do you have for Asian American writers? For emerging writers in general? 19 This pattern appears to hold only partly true for Asian American literature courses at the university level, which are often cross-‐listed with Asian American or Ethnic Studies departments. In an informal study I conducted of 21 Asian American literature/Studies syllabi taught at both public and private universities from 1992-‐2010, the most commonly taught texts were Woman Warrior (7), Obasan (7), Bone (6), and No-No Boy (6), with The Joy Luck Club and Fifth Chinese Daughter both taught in 3 courses. What would be interesting is a survey of course syllabi from the early years of Asian American Studies, particularly 1975-‐1995.
27 LEE: I don’t have any advice for Asian-‐American writers only. My advice for all emerging writers is to read and read and read, as much and as widely as one can. And then if you truly do want to write, to sit down and do so, without making excuses for why you can’t or don’t want to write that day. All the true writers I know are extremely focused, and exhibit an almost fierce stubbornness when it comes to doing their work. (Kartika Review, 2009, v. 6)20
Lee’s rather blunt recourse to “true writers” clearly reflects his perceived alliance with the politics of publishing and the universalizing skill of craft, signaling the potential difficulty that Asian American literary criticism and publications have perhaps always faced beyond the borders of their individual institutions.
This dissertation has the potential to bridge the chasm that currently marks the divergent ways that certain Asian American texts are read in Asian American Studies departments (which is to say, less as literature than as historical document), while simultaneously encouraging the “taking seriously” of minority literature within English departments, where such literature often serves the purpose of fulfilling “diversity requirements,” whether unofficial or academically sanctioned, for the larger university population. In this sense, English departments and Asian American Studies departments tend to read Asian American literature with essentially the same limitations, treating it as creative non-‐fiction. As I see it, the relationship between Asian American literature and both literary studies and Ethnic studies is fundamentally an agonistic one, and thus literature can be understood to be the common ground upon which this conflict is played out. As such, I think that the heretofore overlooked way in which texts institutionally marked as “Asian
20 Lee also comments earlier in the interview that “I certainly hope that I’m not read by Asian-‐Americans or
anyone else solely because of the subject matter or ‘ethnicity’ of my books.”
28
American” (through anthologization or other forms of social validation) use games as a way to conceptualize, for example, the fiction of choice in racial self-‐identification, the odds of overcoming biological chance through assimilative skill, or the liberatory potential of mimicry and make-‐believe, provides a point of interrogation that can, by way of strengthening the institutionalization of Asian American literature for Asian American Studies and Literature departments, attend to the “theoretical weakness” that has crippled our field. For to suggest that Asian American Studies is “weakly institutionalized” is another way of saying that its “gameness” has not been adequately established. Because of this, it offers the rare opportunity to see what institutions might look like before they become fully grasped as “games,” and at the same time interprets this lack of full translatability in negative terms, as a “weakness,” exposing the extent to which the desire for theory and for institutionalization is essentially a desire to be accorded full rights: not as a citizen, but as a player. Hence, what affirmative action (an education policy which is strangely absent from Chiang’s analysis, given that it and the departmentalization of Asian American Studies are two versions of the same “call for representation”) sought to do by “leveling the playing field” can be understood as the legally sanctioned version of this bestowal of rights. It also clues us in to the ways in which political agitation, when the goal is to be allowed into the game, can unwittingly play into the hands of the very institutions that are supposedly being challenged. Method and Research Design Chapter Structure. Ideally, I would like to publish or create conference papers out of each
29
individual chapter, so feedback as to the most productive way of structuring chapters to achieve this would be greatly appreciated. At this point, the organizational structure that I envision for this project looks at four distinct forms of game-‐play in Asian American literature.21 Method. While both Bourdieu and Chiang regularly use the term “game” to metaphorize the social relations which inhere in the circulation of and aspiration for various forms of capital, or, as Bourdieu does in The Logic of Practice, treat games as one aspect of habitus for tribal societies (specifically the Kabyles of Algeria, another indication of a theoretical affinity between games and racialization), literary depictions of games generally exceed the purview of their interests. Thus, I will also be engaging with literary game theory, in particular the 1968 special issue of Yale French Studies edited by Jacques Ehrmann, as well as with early structuralist accounts of the cultural significance of play, beginning with J. Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938) and Roger Caillois’ Man, Play, and Games (1958), from which much literary game theory draws. I am having a difficult time finding Asian American critical texts which are specifically interested in the question of play and games outside of S.L. Wong’s chapter, “Homo Ludens,” in Necessity and Extravagance: Reading
21 I have not included “performance” as a specific category of games. Ultimately, my decision to focus on
games, rather than performativity as such, is based on my belief that the concept of game-‐play is able to illuminate certain facets of Asian American literature that performativity does not, particularly when it comes to narrative fiction. These facets include the distinction between winning and losing and, more broadly, the stakes of performing versus playing, as well as the presence of external operators, such as institutional structures or other players, that exceed the status of bodily performance and gestures. Rather than understanding Asian American authors or characters to be “performing” their Asian Americanness, as, for example, Judith Butler has suggested women perform their gender, I focus on the ways in which race as a playable representation can be interpreted through the performance of institutional strictures.
30
Asian American Literature.22 Finally, I briefly considered, but have for the moment tabled, the possibility of including Asian American graphic novels, mostly because 1) there are so few, and 2) they may expand the discussion of genre and literary convention beyond what is feasible for the timely completion of the current project . If you have a strong opinion regarding this, I would like to hear it. Chapter Breakdown Chapter 1. The fiction of choice in The Joy Luck Club This chapter undertakes a reading of what I consider to be the most overlooked and uncritically dismissed novel in Asian American literary studies: Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. This text posits a connection between “Asian” and “American” in explicit game terms, taking it up as both a generic convention and a trope for immigration and assimilation. Using the game of mahjongg as both a metaphor for intra-‐ and intergenerational struggle and as a structural framework for the book’s organization (the novel is divided into sixteen “rounds,” in which each woman’s story plays out and is then taken up and reworked through the next “player’s” narrative turn), The Joy Luck Club has long been vilified by Asian American critics for its supposedly “inauthentic” portrayal of Chinese language and cultural values (see Wong 1995) and derided for its “pandering” to a Western audience which thrills to Orientalist literary depictions (see Chin 1991). However, Tan’s staging of the U.S. immigration institution as an explicit game structure which the Asian immigrant must navigate through stratagem and collective cunning has been largely ignored as a viable 22 Wong’s major critical contribution in terms of this project is that play is treated disparagingly by the Asian immigrant community for its apparent lack of utility; basically, play is antithetical to work, and work is necessary for survival. Thus, play is a type of extravagance that is unacceptable to the immigrant mentality. She then goes on to complicate this insight by suggesting that play can itself can be seen as a form of labor.
31
model for discussing Asian-‐U.S. immigration, which, as Jinqi Ling has pointed out, has turned away from a unidirectional nationalist discourse only to rely too heavily on the rhetoric of transnationalism to provide a spatial foundation for political engagement (Ling 2011, ii). What Tan does, by interweaving the “Western” game of chess into the “Eastern” game of mahjongg, is reveal the limitations of both models. The novel suggests that immigrating can be understood as the act of stepping onto a game board (the limits of the nation being coterminous with the boundaries of the game) and being faced with two unsatisfactory choices: playing at playing the game, i.e. not knowing the rules, or playing the game, which is to say accepting the fiction of the American dream as attainable reality and egalitarian ideal. Exposing the fictionality of the binary that tends to haunt Asian American Studies – the choice of assimilating rather than remaining “authentic” – is Tan’s attempt to formulate a politics of recognition that, in essence, seeks to beat the State at its own game of (mis)recognition. Chapter 2. The illusion of character in The Woman Warrior As suggested earlier, games can serve the purpose of character development – with its multiple attendant meanings – by providing models of real-‐world situations which force children to conceptualize the significance of rules, limits and the interrelatedness of action. These models essentially produce, through play, the concept of personality and moral character. Psychologists and game theorists alike have noted the significance of a particular form of this game – make-‐believe or role-‐playing – which children universally engage in (see Piaget 1932, Caillois 1962). In this chapter, I explore the way in which these fantastic games become the crux for developing the notion of (an) Asian American character in
32
Maxine Hong Kingston’s hugely influential novel The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Where The Joy Luck Club was categorically denounced by Asian American literary critics, Kingston’s novel has – with the notable exception of Frank Chin – been widely heralded as the first great success of Asian American literature, and continues to hold canonical status in Asian American Studies as well as Literature departments nationwide. The novel itself, I suggest, is playing a game with the conventions of genre literature by frustrating the possibility of inhabiting singular generational or racial roles vis-‐à-‐vis kinship structures and national cultural values. The narrator’s performance of multiple characters (she is sometimes an ostracized aunt in China, sometimes Fa Mulan, a vengeful woman warrior, sometimes a lonely Chinese American child and sometimes the adult Maxine herself) and the resultant admiration which that multiplicity has garnered from literary critics allows us to understand the ways in which postmodern identity politics continue to depend on the illusion of (a) racial character. Illusion is, as Roger Caillois has pointed out, nothing more than the beginning of a game (in-lusio, originating from ludus [Caillois 19]). This game of character resonates on the level of content, but also on the level of generic form, for we can understand the novel itself to be a laboratory in which, as in all games, ideal conditions are artificially induced to account (or, in scientific terms, “control”) for deviations among individual subjects in order to produce a universally transposable model. Generic experimentation – one of Woman Warrior’s acknowledged achievements (see Wong 1999) – thus can also be understood as an insular game in which the author performs the role of puppeteer and invokes the fictionality of play as a way to maintain the fictionality of the text and its characters.
33
Chapter 3. When play becomes work: Fifth Chinese Daughter and aesthetic labor Like Tan and Kingston, Jade Snow Wong suffered the wrath of Frank Chin in his tellingly titled, “Come all ye Asian American writers of the Real and the Fake” (Chan et al. 1991, 2-‐ 92); according to Chin, Wong’s novel, Fifth Chinese Daughter – the acknowledged predecessor to Woman Warrior – falls into the latter category because it “stylizes the essential clichés of the Charlie Chan good Chinese American honorary white” (24-‐5). Unlike Kingston’s, however, Wong’s novel, published in 1950, has long since been discarded as a seminal Asian American text, particularly since the “rediscovery” of an earlier female Asian American writer, Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton). In this chapter, as in Chapter 1, I reexamine an Asian American novel which has provoked a remarkable amount of vitriolic criticism by Asian American literary critics. And as with The Joy Luck Club, I ask whether the predominance of games in Fifth Chinese Daughter may bear some relation to its rejection as a canonical Asian American text. In particular, I take up one of the novel’s presiding yet overlooked concerns – the possibility of making a career out of play – to posit an alternative reading of Asian American autobiographical fiction which refuses the antiquated binaries of “real” versus “fake”, “authentic” versus “inauthentic,” and “minority” versus “mainstream” literature.
Beyond the Asian American community, Jade Snow Wong was actually a rather well-‐
known and well-‐received figure: but as a potter, not as an author. Wong’s aesthetic labor is thus twofold: she explicitly states that her career in ceramics – which was initially decried as a frivolous, not to mention gender-‐inappropriate pursuit by her family and the Stockton Chinatown community – is intended to support what she sees as an actual playful endeavor: the writing of her autobiography. At the same time, she is drawn to the aesthetic
34
potential of ceramics because it allows her to actualize the pleasure of labor – the development of technique and skill, the satisfaction of material production instilled in her through her family’s overalls factory – through the labor of pleasure. I thus suggest in this chapter that the Asian immigrant family, with its historical ties to low-‐paying machine-‐driven labor in factories, laundries and plantations, in fact creates the impulse for play, even while discursively discouraging it through a heavy emphasis on labor and economic gain. The blurring of the epistemological boundaries between labor and leisure, and between tool and toy, seems to encourage a desire in the Asian American child to continue this fusion through aesthetic play, a game in which Schiller has suggested the inherent possibilities of social freedom (cf. Schiller 1954, letters 41-‐43). However, the ideal aesthetic object in Asian American literary terms is not adequately theorized from the disinterested perspective of the viewer, for, given the historical economic realities of Asian immigration, as well as the institutionalization of the art world, it is always implicated in a consumerist economy of exchange. Chapter 4. Playing to lose (oneself) in How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction World and “In a World Small Enough” Alongside games of competition, chance and mimicry, Roger Caillois included a fourth type of play in his taxonomy of games: ilinx, the Greek word for “whirlpool,” which he used to describe a whole class of games -‐ among them children’s rapid spinning to produce dizziness, tight-‐rope walking, and a variety of amusement park rides -‐ which “attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind” (Caillois 1962, 23). This chapter analyzes two literary works
35
which actively seek to induce vertigo by using the sensual loss of perception as a metaphor to examine the stakes of cultural and racial identity loss. David Wong Louie’s little-‐known short story, “In a World Small Enough,” depicts a grim dystopian future following the dropping of an atomic bomb, with the main character, Antonio Ma, finding himself unable to hold onto his job, his family, his bicycle and even his teeth. A generic experiment in its own right, the story interweaves and adapts conventions of detective fiction (a genre which itself is often thought of as a game between author and reader23), historical fiction, and scientific textbooks. According to The Big Aiiieeeee! editors, who anthologized the story, Louie’s great achievement was countering the “model minority” stereotype of Asians as reserved and economically successful through his creation of the dissipated, incompetent and hypersexual (though impotent) Antonio Ma. The editors lauded what they saw as the story’s ultimate goal: to “make rubble of this [model minority] myth and to reinterpret the basic laws of nature” (Chan et al. 1991, 580). The pairing of these two seemingly disparate projects – dispelling stereotypes and reinterpreting nature – is not as flippant or absurd as it first perhaps appears: the destabilization of racial and physical perceptions are analogous possibilities if one considers them as twin outcomes of simultaneously-‐played games of ilinx.
Charles Yu’s recent novelistic debut, How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction World,
uses the concept of time travel to induce a similarly disorienting effect in both reader and character. The main character (also named Charles Yu) is a listless, unambitious time-‐ machine mechanic who finds himself trapped in a time-‐continuum loop, where he must forever play out his own painful death unless he can find a way to escape to an alternate
23 see, for example, Bernard Suits, “The Detective Story: A Case Study of Games in Literature,” Canadian
Review of Comparative Literature, June 1985, 200-‐219.
36
version of reality. The solution, it turns out, is to play a hide-‐and-‐seek game to find his father, a man literally lost in time after he builds a time machine to escape his own confining reality as an ambitious but little-‐respected immigrant scientist with limited linguistic or economic means. The novel engages with the possibility of identity politics in a cartographically abstract, “postrace” world – most of Charles’ companions are robots and holographic AIs whom he knows only by voice, and most of Earth’s major cities have become uninhabitable wastelands, driving much of the population into single-‐occupancy spaceships – by using the generic conventions of science fiction to present the destabilizing effects of an acultural and denationalized reality alongside those of losing a chronological experience of time and memory.
37 Working Bibliography
Primary Works Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse; Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. [1st ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968. Chang, Lan Samantha. Hunger : A Novella and Stories. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. Chieng, Chieh. A Long Stay in a Distant Land : A Novel. New York: Bloomsbury : Distributed by Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2006. Cho, Margaret. I'm the One That I Want. 1st ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001. Chu, Louis. Eat a Bowl of Tea. New York: L. Stuart, 1961. Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. Chuang, Hua. Crossings. Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1986. Cortázar, Julio. Hopscotch. New York: Pantheon Books, 1966. Hahn, Kimiko. Mosquito & Ant : Poems. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Kadohata, Cynthia. The Floating World. New York, N.Y.: Viking, 1989. Kim, Ronyoung. Clay Walls : A Novel. Sag Harbor, N.Y.: Permanent Press, 1986. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior : Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. ———. Tripmaster Monkey : His Fake Book. 1st ed. New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1989. Lahiri, Jhumpa. "A Temporary Matter." In Interpreter of Maladies: Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Le, Nam. The Boat. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Lew, Walter K. Premonitions : The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry. New York: Kaya Productions, 1995. Li, Yiyun. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers : Stories. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2005. Louie, David Wong. "In a World Small Enough." Chicago Review 35, no. 4 (1987): 90-‐102. Murayama, Milton. All I Asking for Is My Body. San Francisco: Supa Press, 1975. Rhinehart, Luke. The Dice Man. New York: W. Morrow, 1971. Shan, Sa, and Adriana Hunter. The Girl Who Played Go. London: Chatto & Windus, 2003. Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam's, 1989. Wang, Ping. The Last Communist Virgin : Stories. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2007. Wong, Jade Snow. Fifth Chinese Daughter. [1st ed. New York: Harper, 1950. Yamamoto, Hisaye, and King-‐Kok Cheung. Seventeen Syllables, Women Writers. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Yamauchi, Wakako, and Garrett Kaoru Hongo. Songs My Mother Taught Me : Stories, Plays, and Memoir. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1994. Yang, Gene Luen, and Lark Pien. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second, 2006. Yu, Charles. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010. ———. Third Class Superhero. Orlando: Harcourt, 2006. Critical Bibliography Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. "The Role of Games in Rabelais." Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 124-‐32. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. 1st American ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. Bourdieu, Pierre. "The Forms of Capital." In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by J Richardson, 241-‐58. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986. ———. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital : The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. North, Michael. Machine-Age Comedy, Modernist Literature & Culture. Oxford, England ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Donna Landry, and Gerald M. MacLean. The Spivak Reader : Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Routledge, 1996.
38
Turner, Victor Witter. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures,. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1969. Asian American Cultural Studies Chow, Rey. "How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory." Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 116, no. 1 (2001): 69-‐74. Chuh, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise : On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Clarke, Irvine III, and Ryan Mannion. "Marketing Sport to Asian-‐American Consumers." Sport Marketing Quarterly 15 (2006): 20-‐28. Kurashige, Lon. Japanese American Celebration and Conflict : A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934- 1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Lee, Robert G. Orientals : Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Asian American History and Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999. Lowe, Albert Alwin. "Reading Asian American Representations : Race and Sport in an International Frame." Masters Thesis, University of California, San Diego, 2000. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts : On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Palumbo-‐Liu, David. Asian/American : Historical Crossings of Racial Frontier. Stanford University: Stanford University Press, 2000. Asian American Literary Criticism Adams, Bella. Asian American Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Chan, Jeffery Paul, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian- American Writers. Washington,: Howard University Press, 1974. ———, eds. The Big Aiiieeeee! : An Anthology of Asian American Writers, Mentor Book. New York, N.Y.: Mentor, 1991. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race : Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Cheung, King-‐Kok. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. Articulate Silences : Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Reading Women Writing. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Chiang, Mark. The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies : Autonomy and Representation in the University. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Chin, Frank. "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake." In The Big Aiiieeeee! : An Anthology of Asian American Writers, Mentor Book, edited by Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Wong. New York: Mentor, 1991. Davis, Rocío G., and Sue-‐Im Lee. Literary Gestures : The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006. Gomez-‐Vega, Ibis. "Losing Everything in David Wong Louie's "In a World Small Enough"." Short Story 16, no. 2 (2008): 63-‐77. Hsu, Kai-‐yu, and Helen Palubinskas. Asian-American Authors, Multi-Ethnic Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Huang, Betsy. Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Huang, Guiyou. Asian American Literary Studies, Introducing Ethnic Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. ———. Asian American Short Story Writers : An a-to-Z Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. ———. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature, The American Mosaic. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2009. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature, an Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Koshy, Susan. "The Fiction of Asian American Literature." Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 2 (1996): 315-‐46. Lee, Christopher. "Asian American Literature and the Resistances of Theory." Modern Fiction Studies 56, no. 1 (2010): 19-‐39.
39
Lee, Rachel C. The Americas of Asian American Literature : Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Li, David Leiwei. Imagining the Nation : Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent, Asian America. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998. Lim, Shirley. Asian-American Literature : An Anthology. Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC Pub. Group, 2000. ———. Transnational Asian American Literature : Sites and Transits. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006. Ling, Jinqi. "Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita's Transnational Novels." University of California, Los Angeles, 2011 (in press). ———. Narrating Nationalisms : Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. "The Game of Negotiation : Cultural Politics in Post-‐Wwii Asian American Literary Discourse." 1992. Lye, Colleen. "Racial Form." Representations 104, no. 1 (2008): 92-‐101. ———. "The Sino-‐Japanese Conflict of Asian American Literature." Genre 39, no. 4 (2006): 43-‐63. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Race & Resistance : Literature & Politics in Asian America, Race and American Culture. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Palumbo-‐Liu, David. "The Ethnic As "Post-‐": Reading Reading the Literatures of Asian America." American Literary History 7, no. 1 (1995): 161-‐68. Sohn, Stephen Hong, and John Blair Gamber. "Currents of Study: Charting the Course of Asian American Literary Criticism." Studies in the literary imagination. 37, no. 1 (2004): 1. Sohn, Stephen Hong, Paul Lai, and Donald C. Goellnicht. "Theorizing Asian American Fiction: Special Issue." Modern Fiction Studies 56, no. 1 (2010). Sumida, Stephen H. "Centers without Margins: Responses to Centrism in Asian American Literature." American Literature 66, no. 4 (1994): 803-‐15. Tanaka, Ronald. "On the Metaphysical Foundations of a Sansei Poetics: Ethnicity and Social Science." Journal of Ethnic Studies 7, no. 2 (1979): 1-‐35. Wand, David Hsin-‐fu. Asian-American Heritage; an Anthology of Prose and Poetry. New York,: Washington Square Press, 1974. Wong, Sau-‐ling Cynthia. Maxine Hong Kingston's the Woman Warrior : A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Reading Asian American Literature : From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. ———. "'Sugar Sisterhood': Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon." In The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, edited by David Palumbo-‐Liu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Yu, Timothy. Race and the Avant-Garde : Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965, Asian America. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009. ———. "Traveling Genres and the Failure of Asian American Short Fiction." Genre 39, no. 4 (2006): 23-‐41. Zhou, Xiaojing, and Samina Najmi. Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Game Theory & Media Studies Ashby, W. Ross. An Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall, 1956. Axelos, Kostas, and Beverly Livingston. "The Set's Game-‐Play of Sets." Yale French Studies, no. 58 (1979): 95-‐ 101. Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. London: Thames and Hudson, 1962. Caillois, Roger, and Jeffrey Mehlman. "Riddles and Images." Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 148-‐58. Coulter, Gerry. "Jean Baudrillard and the Definitive Ambivalence of Gaming." Games and Culture 2, no. 4 (2007): 358-‐65. Ehrmann, Jacques. "Introduction." Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 5. Ehrmann, Jacques, Cathy Lewis, and Phil Lewis. "Homo Ludens Revisited." Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 31-‐57. Fink, Eugen, Ute Saine, and Thomas Saine. "The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play." Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 19-‐30. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman : Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
40
Holquist, Michael. "How to Play Utopia." Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 106-‐23. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens : A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1949. Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Kucklich, J. R. "Virtual Worlds and Their Discontents: Precarious Sovereignty, Governmentality, and the Ideology of Play." Games and Culture 4, no. 4 (2009): 340-‐52. Lastowka, Greg. "Rules of Play." Games and Culture 4, no. 4 (2009). Lears, T. J. Jackson. Something for Nothing : Luck in America. New York: Viking, 2003. Lenoir, Tim. "All but War Is Simulation: The Military-‐Entertainment Complex." Configurations 8 (2000): 289-‐ 335. Liu, L. H. "The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory." Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2010): 288-‐320. Oriard, Michael. Sporting with the Gods : The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture. Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Plotkin, Cary. ""Scribble"." Yale French Studies, no. 58 (1979): 116. Schelling, Thomas C. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Seltzer, Mark. "Parlor Games: The Apriorization of the Media." Critical inquiry. 52, no. 1 (2009): 100. Suits, Bernard. "The Detective Story: A Case Study of Games in Literature." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Litterature Comparee 12, no. 2 (June 1985): 200-‐19. Suits, Bernard Herbert. The Grasshopper : Games, Life, and Utopia. Toronto ; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1978. Sutton-‐Smith, Brian. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Swirski, Peter. Of Literature and Knowledge : Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory. London ; New York: Routledge, 2007. Verbeek, Peter-‐Paul. What Things Do : Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Von Neumann, John, and Oskar Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. [2d ed. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1947. Wilson, Robert Rawdon. "In Palamedes' Shadow: Game and Play Concepts Today." Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Litterature Comparee 12, no. 2 (1985): 177-‐99. Wimsatt, W. K. "How to Compose Chess Problems, and Why." Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 68-‐85. Language Games/Semiotics Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words, The William James Lectures,. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Beaujour, Michel. "Introduction." Yale French Studies, no. 58 (1979): 6-‐14. ———. "The Game of Poetics." Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 58-‐67. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. 1st American ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ———. "Scribble (Writing-‐Power)." Yale French Studies, no. 58 (1979): 117-‐47. Greimas, A. J., and Francois Rastier. "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints." Yale French Studies, no. 41 (1968): 86-‐105. Oda, Dennis. "Poets Unite in Differences." Honolulu Star-Bulletin April 25, 2010. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, Rare Masterpieces of Philosophy and Science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954. Scott, Steven D. The Gamefulness of American Postmodernism : John Barth & Louise Erdrich, Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory. New York: P. Lang, 2000. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1953. Psychology/Morality of Games Berne, Eric. Games People Play : The Psychology of Human Relationships. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1977. Farver, Jo Ann M., Yonnie Kwak Kim, and Yoolim Lee. "Cultural Differences in Korean-‐ and Anglo-‐American Preschoolers' Social Interaction and Play Behaviors." Child Development 66, no. 4 (Aug 1995). Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice : Psycholog. Theory and Women's Development. Cambridge, Mass. u.a.: Harvard Univ. Pr., 1982. Piaget, Jean. [Le Jugement Moral Chez L'enfant] the Moral Judgment of the Child. Translated by Marjorie Gabain. London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1932.
41
Performance & Drama Bergson, Henri, Cloudesley Brereton, and Fred Rothwell. Laughter; an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press, 1979, 2008. Freud, Sigmund, and A. A. Brill. Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1917. Horvath, Agnes, Bjorn Thomassen, and Harald Wydra. "Liminality and Cultures of Change." International Political Anthropology 3 (2009). Szakolczai, Arpad. "Liminality and Experience: Structuring Transitory Situations and Transformative Events." International Political Anthropology 3 (2009). Turner, Victor Witter. From Ritual to Theatre : The Human Seriousness of Play. New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982. van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960.