Annotation: Rachel C. Lee’s “An Asian American Cultural Production in Asian-Pacific Perspective” (1999)

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Lee, Rachel C. “Asian American Cultural Production in Asian-Pacific Perspective.” Boundary 2. 26.2. (1999): 231-254. Print.

Lee begins her essay discussing how Asian American scholars must grapple with the pressures of globalization to reconcile the field’s foundational US-centric national focus with transnational forces and concerns. She notes how Asia-Pacific Rim scholars also assert the need to explore “the meanings of Asian American cultural production to the formation of alternative imagined communities ‘created by travel and trade, and…mobilized in dispersion’ rather than primarily through settlement within individual nation-states” (232). In her essay Lee specifically explores Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, which she argues speaks directly to these field contentions.

She begins by offering helpful background on how the concept of “Pacific Rim” was initially derived as foil to NAFTA. Lee notes that while Pacific Rim evokes a definite geographic locale, it is “defined by an economic logic specifically designed to transgress national borders,” thereby “undermin[ing] the persuasiveness of territorial nationalism (235). Lee goes on to cite a passage from What Is in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea where Arif Dirlik argues that in the Pacific region, “[e]mphasis on human activity shifts attention from physical area to the construction of geography through human interactions” (236). For the purposes of my own paper, I argue that this is particularly true with respect to Yamashita’s other novel Tropic of Orange, where “human interactions” shaped by political and economic forces such as NAFTA precipitate the literal morphing of the geographic topography of the Americas.

In her discussion of Through the Arc of the Rainforest Yamashita asserts that the novel is a “respons[e] to the unsettling effects of globalization or time-space compression” (238). Lee relies on Doreen Massey’s definition of “time-space compression” which she describes as the “movement and communication across space, to the geographic stretching-out of social relations, and our experience of all this” (238). Lee notes how Yamashita sets her novel in Metacão, a fictional territory that calls attention to the fiction of geographic borders in general, especially in a globalized world where transnational flows and exchanges repeatedly transgress those boundaries. Lee suggests that borders are then merely political national constructions used to regulate the flows of capital, people, goods, culture, etc. She calls attention to how “heterogeneous national, racial and cultural components” converge at Metacão, which is represented through a highly diverse cast of characters. Lee emphasizes how Yamashita takes pains to depict “globalization as a multiform” rather than exchanges between the East and West.

Elaborating on the novel’s relation to Asian American studies, Lee asserts that the Japanese immigrant character, Kazumasa Ishimaru emerges as “a subtle parody of a familiar archetype, the Chinese American railroad worker” (242). Lee discusses how Asian American scholars have traditionally deployed this history of Chinese immigrant involvement in the construction of the transcontinental railroad as an argument for Asian American enfranchisement and belonging in the US. She claims that by reworking this archetype, from Chinese to Japanese immigrant and manual track laborer to more advanced position of railroad technician and inspector, Yamashita articulates the need and means for shifting the field of Asian American studies from a narrow national perspective to trans- and even post-national considerations. Lee writes:

[I]n a time when national utitilies are fragmenting into competing capitalist units, when building the infrastructure is less important than downsizing to maximize profits, when railways signify less as patriotic achievements and more as a ‘lucrative travel business,’ crafting a national hero is to create a deliberate anachronism, a figure who, despite having saved ‘hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives’ (TAR, 10), is outplaced.” (245)

Lee emphasizes that Yamashita does not entirely abandon the history of the railroad but rather demonstrates how its construction and the act of laboring on the railroad is infused with new meaning and implications within a contemporary globalized context.

She asserts that this Japanese immigrant character’s presence alongside a multicultural, multinational, and hybrid cast, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest differs from other conventional works of Asian American fiction, suggesting that the forces of globalization compel narrative expansion beyond a solely Asian or Asian American focus. Lee claims that Yamashita is more concerned with the emergence of “alternative communities…composed of nationally and racially heterogeneous social actors who are globally interrelated by virtue of worldwide media links, touristic travel across borders, international finance networks, transnational trade, and a shared ecology” (247).

Lee finally concludes her essay by suggesting that resistance against the convergence of Asian American Studies and Asia-Pacific Rim Studies stems from overlooked “class cleavages” rather than territorial disputes (250). She suggests that while Asia-Pacific Rim scholars celebrate the cosmopolitan, “transnational Asian capitalist” that form comprise of an elite entrepreneurial class, Asian American scholars will not embrace the field unless more attention is given to “marginalized, even disenfranchised, subjects in the basin” (251, 250). Lee asserts however, that the realities of our globalization demonstrate that Asian American scholars can no longer cling to their “foundational subaltern identity politics” and must come to acknowledge the economic privilege of some Asian/American groups in spite of their racial marginalization, which Yamashita powerfully depicts in her character, Kazumasu. Lee finally leaves us with the observation that Through the Arc of the Rain Forest “advocates a forgetfulness of traumatic monoracial politics in order to enable the imagining of hybrid—and even pleasurable—spatial, racial, and cross-class convergences” (254).

Annotation: Pei-Chia Lan’s “Legal Servitude and Free Illegality” (2007)

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Lan, Pei-Chia. “Legal Servitude and Free Illegality: Migrant ‘Guest’ Workers in Taiwan.” Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions. Eds. Rhacel S. Parreñas and Lok C. D. Siu. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. 253-277. Print.

In her essay Lan broadly explores the experience of migrant guest workers in Taiwan. She asserts that “transmigration within Asia” has greatly increased “in the last decade” as workers, generally from Southeast Asian countries, come to fill the demand for cheap labor in the rapidly industrializing East Asian states (254). Lan argues that migrants are heavily exploited within the guest worker contract system, emphasizing that many actually find more freedom, better working conditions and wages by running away from their employers and assuming a state of illegality. She accentuates that such realities challenge popular assumptions about “improved security within legal realms and prevalent vulnerability in irregular migration” (254). Lan further demonstrates that in spite of globalization, the nation-state still retain their incredible influence in the world economy by regulating international labor flows.

Lan defines “guest worker” as “migrant workers [who] are employed on temporary contracts and are prohibited from immigrating or becoming naturalized” (255). She suggests that this system can be somewhat paralleled to indentured servitude or the “‘coolie’ system” in the United States (255). Lan emphasizes that as “guest workers,” migrants are treated as merely “disposable labor,” and are only allowed residence within a country for a specified term (256). Forbidden from developing family or communal ties that will lead to any form of “permanent settlement,” their labor is merely exhausted for the defined period and then they are expected to return to their home country. Lan accentuates that the guest worker system in Asian countries is particularly distinct because of the incredible degree of direct government intervention and regulation. She reveals that “[s]everal Asian governments, for example those of the Philippines and Indonesia, have established special labor export agencies within their national bureaucracies to regulate flows, train potential migrants, and promote their workers to receiving countries” (256).

In her discussion of Taiwan, Lan suggests that in “October 1989” the government “authorized a special order that allowed foreigners to work for a national construction project,” which gradually extended to private sector work (257). She further notes how Taiwan’s “Council of Labor Affairs (CLA)” was established to levy quotas and manage the distribution of migrant workers in various industries. She accentuates that these guest worker policies are specifically aimed to “ensure that migrant workers are temporally transient and spatially fixed” (258). While these laborers are geographically within the nation-state they are barred from permanent residence. Lan interestingly notes, however, that these policies differ in terms of class. Whereas blue-collar workers are rigorously regulated by the quota system and “are not eligible for permanent residence or citizenship,” white-collar workers are not subjected to the same restrictions (258). Lan argues that one of the most disabling features of the guest worker contract is how it “depriv[es]…[migrants] of the right to circulate in the domestic labor market” as they can only work for their designated employer for their specified term in Taiwan (259). She suggests this is one frightening demonstrating of how the government manages it’s the international labor population and essentially “monito[r] the weareabouts of these ethnic others” (259).

She suggests that migrants also have to pay exorbitant placement fees in order to secure employment in Taiwan. Lan notes that this is probably due to the fact that Taiwan is a desirable place to work and offers relatively higher wages than other Asian countries. Probably the biggest reason, however, is that the competitive broker industry fighting for the business of a “limited number of employers possessing quotas” (260). Lan emphasizes that as these employers receive “kickback[s]” from broker, the financial burden is subsequently displaced to the migrant workers (260). She notes that within this system, quotas are more valued than the workers themselves, who are easily disposable.

Lan goes on to discuss how the “bondage of contract employment” essentially turns the guest worker system into a form of slavery as migrants lack real legal protection due to their alien status and are deprived of the right of mobility, the right to quit and change employers. Lan suggests that workers are often compelled to overlook their unfavorable working conditions and abuses so as to get their contracts renewed and pay off their accumulated debts. She reveals that in light of these harsh realities some migrants choose to runaway.

Lan emphasizes that with their new undocumented status many migrants find better working conditions, as they gain the freedom to choose whom to work for and can leave whenever they please. With their new employers they can also use the threat of quitting to negotiate better wages and hours. While Lan acknowledges that undocumented workers do face some risk such as deportation and “lack of legal protection and health insurance,” she claims that they surprisingly find more satisfaction with their “illegality.” She goes on to discuss how migrants have subverted the original regulative measures of the passport as form of national identification by creating and obtaining forgeries to (re)enter Taiwan and work outside of the terms granted in their guest worker contracts.

She ultimately concludes her essay by asserting that “[t]he ‘guest’worker policy in Asia has created a highly exploitative system of labor migration. Migrant workers not only lack political rights and civil liberties but also are deprived of the economic right of market mobility” (271). Lan also offers a final warning to countries such as the United States that are thinking about instituting a guest worker system to supplant more “irregular migration” flows (272). She accentuates that without proper regard to upholding the civil rights of migrant workers, the US may be sanctioning and indeed perpetuating a more insidious system of slavery.

Annotation: Rachel C. Lee’s “Transversing Nationalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters” (1999)

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Lee, Rachel C. “Transversing Nationalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters.” The Americas of Asian American Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 73-105. Print.

In her essay Lee asserts that the representation of popular American in Hagedorn’s Dogeaters calls attention to US neocolonialism in the Philippines. She suggests that Hagedorn depicts a world where “Manila residents take pleasure in and identify with icons of U.S. popular culture” which inform their desires (75). But while Lee recognizes American film as means of cultural imperialism, she argues that it also serves as potential grounds from which a collective Filipino identity can be fashioned. Lee notes that Hagedorn presents characters with different colonial mentalities, some hopelessly seduced by Hollywood dreams and others who eventually achieved a “political ‘awakening’” (74). She accentuates that this “awakening” takes many different forms that extend beyond the patriarchal nationalist paradigm as Hagedorn narrates important “feminist and gay awakenings” (74). Lee calls attention to how the novel is not told “from the perspective of elected officials and their military henchmen, but from the perspective of these leaders’ mistresses, sisters, daughters, and wives” (74).

Lee begins her essay by responding to the prevailing critiques of Hagedorn’s putatively “postmodern” literary style. Critics have denounced the novel for its loose treatment of history and lack of realism. Lee, however, places Hagedorn’s novel in the tradition of “decolonizing writing,” which Lisa Lowe describes as possibly “includ[ing] features associated with postmodernism (such as nonlinear, antirepresentational aesthetics), emerges not from a terrain of philosophical or poetic otherness within the West but out of the contradictions of what Bipan Chandra has called the ‘colonial mode of production’”(81). Lee emphasizes that Hagedorn’s shift between multiple perspectives is productive because it compels the readers to recognize how a particular incident is seen, experienced, and represented differently with respect to the narrator’s social relations and status. She offers Pucha’s first hand letter to Rio at the end of the novel as one example. There Pucha speaks extensively for the first time, challenging her cousin’s representation of her, which in turn causes the reader to question the information we have been presented thus far and even more importantly, our ideological assumptions. Lee further notes how Hagedorn’s novel offers different visions of reality that significantly conflict with official narratives by “intellectual such as the nineteenth century French traveler Jean Mallat and the Aemrican president William McKinly” (79).

Lee spends the later half of her essay discussing Hagedorn’s deliberate attention to the “perpetual nonsubjects of history,” particularly the experiences of “feminine postcoloniality” (82, 74). She demonstrates how women in the novel have severely limited societal roles and are deeply constrained within them. Lee notes how the “bomba star,” Lolita Luna, is an incredibly famous actress with an enormous fan but her agency is still deeply circumscribed by masculine power (82). Lolita yearns to escape to America and start a new life there, but to do so she must appeal to “her sexual patron, General Ledesma,” who ultimately refuses, or submit to being the object of an experimental film that intends to feature invasive camera close-ups of her vagina (82). Lee asserts that “Hagedorn’s novel continually stresses how politics—the legacies of colonial power relations, machismo, and patriarchal sentiment—impinge upon the intimate venues of sex, seduction, and family” (85).

But while American movies emerge as a form of US cultural imperialism in the Philippines, Lee argues that Hagedorn does not imply that the people are merely passive recipients of these American images and ideals, “us[ing] the penetrating force of cinematic gaze to reverse the usual power relations between spectator and spectacle” (87). Lee suggests that the gaze Hagedorn attempts to subvert is simultaneously masculine and imperialistic and she does so by focusing on the often overlooked women of the Philippines. Lee asserts that nationalism has historically had an antagonistic relationship with feminism as a predominantly patriarchal movement forwarded through the policing of native women. She notes, however, that Hagedorn’s character, Daisy Avila reconciles nationalism and feminism in the novel. Lee emphasizes that Daisy’s subsequent retreat from the public after winning the beauty contest, stirs “a national crisis because it defies the traditional role of the Filipina to serve her country through self-exhibition” (91). While Daisy must eventually appear on television and turn herself into a spectacle, she mobilizes the media to denounce the beauty contest as perpetuating a harmful pattern of female objectification, something her father, Senator Avila failed to notice or address.

Lee concludes her essay by focusing on “Rio’s transnationalism,” a female character who does manage to successfully escape to the United States (99). She asserts that Hagedorn presents the US as “the site for women’s escape from…[the] male authoritative gaze” (99). Lee emphasizes that Rio wants to go to America, not to become an actress but rather make films. In this manner Hagedorn opens the possibility “where women’s desires might exceed the terms set up by male producers and where women can both produce themselves and inappropriately choose their lovers” (100). Lee offers numerous textual examples alluding to Rio’s lesbian/queer sexual identity and importantly notes that she never gets married, suggesting that such a single independent life is possible in the United States. Yet, Lee also calls attention to the failures of “Rio’s transnationalism,” emphasizing that her escape to America is essentially viewed as an act of betrayal within the nationalistic paradigm because she supposedly allows “foreign men’s appropriation of native men’s possessions” (99).

Lee ultimately emphasizes that Hagedorn does not present Daisy or Rio as perfect models of resistance to imperialistic, sexist forces. Rio refuses to forsake her “deviant” sexual desires “to fight the nationalistic cause, since the prospects of her benefiting from the success of that revolution is question” and as Daisy mobilizes a political resistance movement, her feminist concerns are relegated to a subservient level of importance (102). Joey, the other prominent narrator in the novel, who possesses a queer sexual identity does join Daisy’s political project but at that point his queer-ness is also notably submerged. Lee ultimately accentuates that Hagedorn does not theorize queer subjectivity as “a positive counterhegemonic representational strategy,” offering instead, “space for alternative, as-yet-unrealized identifications to emerge” (103). Hagedorn’s novel reveals that in light of multiple oppressions, multiple strategies are necessary to overcome them.

Annotation: David L. Eng’s “Out Here and Over There” (2001)

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Eng, David L. “Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies (Epilogue).” Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. 204-228. Print.

In his “Epilogue” Eng discusses how Asian Americans have been historically caught between the two paradoxical stereotypes of “model minority” or “yellow peril,” as “perversely assimilated” or “unassimilable aliens” (204). He emphasizes that Asian Americans’ vexed status in the US nation-state compels an examination of how diaspora may be a more productive theoretical framework through which to rework conceptions of kinship, home, and identity. Eng notes that queer studies also face a similar problematic relationship with “home” as queers are sometimes literally exiled from the nation-state or marginalized in the dominant heternormative society. Eng ultimately attempts to employ diaspora and queer theory to revitalize Asian American studies and open new possibilities for cultural and political affiliations. He notes, however, that while diaspora can be viewed as resisting the rigid boundaries of the nation-state, it can also be used to further nationalistic efforts such as in the case of Israel and must be deployed with caution. Eng further highlights the need to examine Asian American and more broadly American studies in a more transnational context especially within our increasingly globalized world.

In his essay Eng also offers a helpful history of the Asian American studies movement. He asserts that historically the movement was predominantly concerned with achieving civil rights and citizenship status within the US nation-state. Spearheaded to a large extent by the editors of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, the movement rejected the notion that Asian Americans were too foreign in order to claim their belonging in the United States. Eng emphasizes, however, that in the process these editors also “prescribe[ed] who a recognizable and recognizably legitimate Asian American racial subject should ideally be: male, heterosexual, working class, American born, and English speaking” (209). While they attempted to combat the white hegemonic emasculinization of Asian American men, they problematically perpetuated rampant homophobia and misogyny. Eng asserts that this “forced repression of feminine and homosexual to masculine, and of home to the nation-state, is a formation in need of queering” (210-11).

Eng notes that the cultural nationalism forwarded by the Aiiieeeee! editors worked to eradicate the hyphen, which they believe suggested that Asian-Americans have an irreconcilable split identity. Their project was to urgently demonstrate how Asian American identity is whole and something that is “wholly viable within the nation-state” (211). Eng points out, however, that the frequent reemergence of this repressed hyphen in various circumstances call attention to how Asian Americans continue to be perceived as foreign and not fully belonging in the United States. He asserts that instead of furthering this act of repression, critics should perhaps risk the hyphen.

Eng claims that one potential effect of acknowledging the hyphen is to compel scholars to more vigorously examine the “Asian” aspect of Asian American identity, effectively extending critical parameters beyond the boundaries of the US nation-state. Eng insists that this diasporic turn is particularly important with respect to the post-1965 immigrants hailing from “Vietnam, South Korea, and the Philippines,” whose narratives and experiences do not begin within the nation-state but rather external global locales that were subjected to US imperialism and colonization. He also urges Asian American scholars to examine new emergent identities, particularly the growing group of individuals who do not simply maintain political affiliation with a single nation-state but adhere to a more transnational diasporic existence. Eng offers “satellite people, parachute kids, reverse settlers, and flexible citizenship” as some prominent examples (214). Even in our increasingly globalized world, however, Eng emphasizes the enduring importance of the nation-state because transnational movements and exchanges still have to maneuver through and “within the concrete, localized space of the nation-state” (214).

Eng also asserts the need to expand the critical potential of queer theory beyond its primary association with sexuality, reframing it as a flexible tool “for evaluating Asian American racial formation across multiple axes of difference as well as numerous local and global manifestations” (215). He particularly critiques how gender and sexuality studies have failed to “embrace queerness as a critical methodology for the understanding of sexual identity as it is dynamically formed in and through racial epistemologies” (218). Eng ultimately urges Asian American studies to employ concepts of queerness and diaspora to rework conceptions of identity and home across multiple sexualities and locales.

In his analysis of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, Eng celebrates how the film dismantles the popular stereotype of the Asian American male as passive and effeminate through its presentation of Gao Wai-Tung as a “successful, savvy, and handsome Asian male” with US citizenship status (221). Eng notes that Wai-Tung’s queer and diasporic identity becomes sources of power and strength as he is able to help Wei-Wei, a Third World Asian woman to obtain a green card and enter the United States. Yet the film ultimately shows the complexities in negotiating queer diasporic identities because Wai-Tung has to essentially mask his homosexual practices behind the guise of a heterosexual marriage. His eventual queer impregnation of Wai-Wai also problematically demonstrates how “Wai-Tun’s position as enfranchised citizen of the U.S. nation-state…is made possible only through his subordination of the diasporic Third World woman” (223).

While Eng recognizes The Wedding Banquet as a failed deployment of queerness and diaspora as modes of resistance against the hegemonic heteronormativity and patriarchal conceptions of the nation-state, he offers R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s as a more productive example. The novel explores the ethnic conflicts and differences between the inhabitants of Hawaii, which Linmark suggests are eventually overcome by “an obsessive queer sexuality…that binds them together as a social group with a common sense of purpose” (225). This, Eng asserts can serve as a viable model for real political activism. He further describes how Limark’s characterization of Orlando as the “model minority” student who overcomes his inferior “minority” status by demonstrating his capabilities in not only math and science but also leadership and representation of his fellow classmates, coupled with his queer sexual identity effectively overturns stereotypes and social expectations of Asian American men.

Annotation: Karen Weyler’s “A Speculating Spirit” (1996)

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This is an annotation for a paper I am currently writing on Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta. See my prospectus here.

Weyler, Karen A. “‘A Speculating Spirit’: Trade, Speculation and Gambling in Early American Fiction.” Early American Literature 31.3 (1996): 207-242. Print.

In this article Weyler argues that popular American novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries play an important role in shaping “public economic discourse” (208). These works not only attempt to reconcile competing desires for material improvement with republican values, but also contribute to the “gendering of the American economic system” by figuring trade as a uniquely “masculine prerogative” (208). Weyler therefore draws a distinction between male and female responsibilities in the new nation. She asserts that while women are charged with remaining “sexually and emotionally chaste,” men have to confront the challenge of being “economically virtuous—meaning that they must balance self-interest and public interest” (208). Ultimately, it is this conception that men need to acquire capital through “virtuous trade” that pervades the politco-economic philosophy of early American novels. Weyler asserts that in response to the inherent problems within trade, namely, the selfish individualistic “ethics” it proposes as well as the material “importation of luxury goods,” novelists of the period strove to distinguish virtuous trade from “gambling, speculation, or inheritance” (210, 208). These authors emphasized the importance of “industry” for achieving successful business ventures and represented the “productive fruits of trade” as not only individualized gains, but patriotic symbols of “America’s trading freedom” (223). These qualities, among others Weyler describes, allowed novelists to set virtuous trade apart from the quick, often self-destructive profits gained through gambling, speculation or inheritance. Her article therefore provides unique insight into the way early American novels represent the nation’s role within the international market, but my research on Margaretta; or, The Intricacies of the Heart offers an opportunity to intervene in Weyler’s argument. Whereas she concerns herself with texts in which males dominate the global economy and trade is largely successful for industrious characters, Read’s novel diverges from these conventional narratives. In Margaretta we are introduced to a chaotic and unpredictable international market, in which males, regardless of their diligence or honorable intentions, emerge as victims of trade. Ultimately, it is this masculine colonial economy that our heroine successfully infiltrates to rescue her lover from the whims of the market, thereby implying a vital role for women in the circum-Atlantic world.