Salzburg Global Fellow Astrid Fellner explores how Asian American writers are redefining identity and citizenship
This article was written by Salzburg Global Fellow Astrid Fellner, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Crossing the Pacific: The Asian American Experience in U.S. Society and Discourse” in September 2024.
In the fall of 2014, I attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program “Defining America: New Writing, New Voices, New Directions." This is where I met one of my favorite authors, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita. What a wonderful time I had speaking to her and listening to her literary voice!
The underlying assumption of that program was that "new writing in new voices is suggesting new directions.” Whenever I teach Yamashita’s novels in my class and show the picture of Karen, Paul Lauter, and me in front of Schloss Leopoldskron, I think of what I took away from that program: Ethnic voices indeed point to new directions in American literature and society.
I believe in the transformative potential of literature in American culture. In my research and teaching, I attempt to show how cultural diversity and social transformation go hand in hand.
As an Americanist with a focus on ethnic American literature across the fields of Border Studies, Gender Studies, and Popular Culture, I frequently teach Asian American literature in my survey literature classes. I touch upon classic novels like Maxine Hong Kingston’s "The Woman Warrior", Amy Tan’s "The Joy Luck Club", David Hwang’s "M. Butterfly", and Bharati Mukherjee’s "Jasmine".
But I’m far from being an expert on Asian American literature. Two writers, however, have especially sparked my interest because they raise new and important questions that have the capacity to rethink the categories of identity, citizenship, and belonging.
In my research, I have focused on Karen Tei Yamashita. Her 1997 novel "Tropic of Orange" is a border text that is deeply entangled in hemispheric connections, dealing with current debates of migration, ethnic belonging, and identitarian spaces. It enacts a border imaginary that connects diasporic subjects to the wider geopolitical, economic, and cultural dynamics of transatlantic and transpacific relations. In this novel, Yamashita’s ethnic characters emerge not as representatives of their ethnic groups, but they possess a global consciousness that exceeds ethnic and national identifications. The character of Bobby Ngu, for instance, eats “Chinese burritos. Fish tacos. Ensopada. Camaron chow mein. Hoy Especial: $ 2.99. Comida to go. Por qué no?”. Clearly, he is a resident of a multicultural and multiracial metropolis.
Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination through the reliance of a North-South perspective, which complements the East-West analytic and “has achieved a near-paradigmatic status for Asian American studies since the mid-1980s.” The (trans-) hemispheric paradigm that Yamashita endorses has become an attractive framework for Americanists, I believe, because it has allowed critics to approach American Studies from a transnational perspective, counteracting the association of the field of American Studies with the nation state.
Another writer who has changed the face of Asian American literature – and certainly also American literature – is Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel "The Sympathizer". This author has introduced the category of “refugee writings” to the genre lexicon of American literature.
My favorite book is his short-story collection "The Refugees", which deals with the experiences of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants. Interestingly, his depictions of experiences of displaced persons also focus on the ways in which refugees and exiles cross social and cultural boundaries of normative gender and institutions of the state. Relying on different representational strategies, Nguyen situates the constructions of diasporic and transnational identities within global processes of colonization, globalization, capitalism, and nationalism.
Karen Tei Yamashita and Viet Thanh Nguyen testify to the fact that Asian American literature has not only become increasingly influential but also highly diverse. As we look to the future, we see queer writers (e.g. Ocean Vuong), writers of diverse genres like the graphic novel (e.g. George Takei), and young adult fiction writers (e.g. Jenny Han) who center the diversity of Asian American experiences within larger struggles for social justice in the U.S.
It is clear that Asian American voices have transformed American literature, carrying the promise of a thriving and increasingly open-ended body of ethnic literature.
Astrid Fellner is chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University, Germany, where she currently also serves as dean of studies of the Faculty of Humanities. She is head of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies at Saarland U and co-editor of a trilingual Border Glossary, a handbook of key terms in Border Studies. She has been involved in a series of research and teaching projects with Ukrainian universities. A member of the BMBF-project "Linking Borderlands," she studies industrial films of the Greater Region SaarLorLux+ and the German/Polish border.
Explore our digital publication, which includes more coverage from the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Crossing the Pacific: The Asian American Experience in U.S. Society and Discourse.”
