Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier

Rating:
Summary: Waxing Poetic on the Trans-Pacific Express
Review: I guess I'm behind the times, or perhaps just mentally unevolved but to me there is a real difference between being intelligent and lucid and being intelligent and obscurantist. David Palumbo-Liu is obviously a very clever man. I think I understood some of what he said, and yes, it was pretty insightful. BUT it was usually thrown away as a tag on the end of some involuted discussion of what anxieties might possibly have been on the mind of some middle-level bureaucrat in the Wilson administration. Or not.

He's got a good handle on the issues, and he sure can deconstruct, but unless you already have a good handle on racial politics, many of the books insights will just not be that obvious.

Don't get this book if you want to learn about the Asian experience in America (Ron Takaki, Roger Daniels and Sucheng Chan are better sources for that). But if you want some intelligent musings on the unbearable lightness of Asian American subjectivity then be my guest.

Rating:
Summary: Waxing Poetic on the Trans-Pacific Express
Review: I guess I'm behind the times, or perhaps just mentally unevolved but to me there is a real difference between being intelligent and lucid and being intelligent and obscurantist. David Palumbo-Liu is obviously a very clever man. I think I understood some of what he said, and yes, it was pretty insightful. BUT it was usually thrown away as a tag on the end of some involuted discussion of what anxieties might possibly have been on the mind of some middle-level bureaucrat in the Wilson administration. Or not.

He's got a good handle on the issues, and he sure can deconstruct, but unless you already have a good handle on racial politics, many of the books insights will just not be that obvious.

Don't get this book if you want to learn about the Asian experience in America (Ron Takaki, Roger Daniels and Sucheng Chan are better sources for that). But if you want some intelligent musings on the unbearable lightness of Asian American subjectivity then be my guest.

Rating:
Summary: A work exemplary in range, reach, & cultural-political care
Review: This study of "Asian/American" identity (and disjuncture of identity), as a function of historical processes and shifting discursive formations, is founded in a research of prodigious learning, risk-taking, and far-reaching speculation. Readings of films, novels, sociological studies, journalistic tracts and images that expose the inclusion/exclusion of Asian Americans as inside ("introjected" as model minority) and outside ("projected" as alien and foreign) the core American national identity are finely and relentlessly situtated within the terrains of a shifting global economy which calls upon racialization phobias (yellow peril discourse) and assimilation myths (model minority stories)to include/exclude Asians to fit US trans/national needs. Brilliantly nuanced, demanding, and politically adjudicated readings of US cultural works-- like The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Flower Drum Song, Native Speaker, Time and New Republic covers, Asiagate-- are enriched and contextualized by counter-readings of transnationalizing urban spaces from Monterey Park to Western Addition to expose and complicate the imbrications of Asia within America: as economy, as phobic excess, as cultural flow, as political ally, as geopolitical/civilizational antagonist. To my mind, this is one of the most important studies I know of the Pacific Ocean space and Asia Pacific imaginary as a racialized "frontier," liminal zone of innovation, and trans/national destiny that deeply implicates the US in patterns of exclusion and inclusion and war and peace demanding our fully historicized attention. David Palumbo-Liu's work offers tools of cultural studies and political-economic care that are exemplary in their range, reach, and general decency in responding to the duplex Asian/American culture. While the categories of time, space, psyche, and body are huge and meandering, the field of American Studies as such is complicated and enriched in its "field imaginary" by this valued, nuanced, probing, and fully situated contribution. The "seam" of Asian and American, as bind and divide, is offered a cultural poetics worthy of the racial problematic and the complicated history of US modernity.

Rating:
Summary: A work exemplary in range, reach, & cultural-political care
Review: This study of "Asian/American" identity (and disjuncture of identity), as a function of historical processes and shifting discursive formations, is founded in a research of prodigious learning, risk-taking, and far-reaching speculation. Readings of films, novels, sociological studies, journalistic tracts and images that expose the inclusion/exclusion of Asian Americans as inside ("introjected" as model minority) and outside ("projected" as alien and foreign) the core American national identity are finely and relentlessly situtated within the terrains of a shifting global economy which calls upon racialization phobias (yellow peril discourse) and assimilation myths (model minority stories)to include/exclude Asians to fit US trans/national needs. Brilliantly nuanced, demanding, and politically adjudicated readings of US cultural works-- like The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Flower Drum Song, Native Speaker, Time and New Republic covers, Asiagate-- are enriched and contextualized by counter-readings of transnationalizing urban spaces from Monterey Park to Western Addition to expose and complicate the imbrications of Asia within America: as economy, as phobic excess, as cultural flow, as political ally, as geopolitical/civilizational antagonist. To my mind, this is one of the most important studies I know of the Pacific Ocean space and Asia Pacific imaginary as a racialized "frontier," liminal zone of innovation, and trans/national destiny that deeply implicates the US in patterns of exclusion and inclusion and war and peace demanding our fully historicized attention. David Palumbo-Liu's work offers tools of cultural studies and political-economic care that are exemplary in their range, reach, and general decency in responding to the duplex Asian/American culture. While the categories of time, space, psyche, and body are huge and meandering, the field of American Studies as such is complicated and enriched in its "field imaginary" by this valued, nuanced, probing, and fully situated contribution. The "seam" of Asian and American, as bind and divide, is offered a cultural poetics worthy of the racial problematic and the complicated history of US modernity.