Creativity and Critique in Asian American Literature: From Juxtaposition to Articulation

ABSTRACT

This essay introduces Amerasia Journal’s special issue on “Creativity and Critique in Asian American Literature.” Drawing upon multi-genre and multimodal contributions to this issue, we theorize different ways of joining creative and critical modes, offering five suppositions as to what this articulation enables for Asian American representation; autobiography and art; embodiment and living archives; generic, epistemological, and structural boundaries; as well as collaborative care and stewardship of Asian American literary and creative arts. In conversation with the contributors, we reflect on creative-critical convergences and how they transform the broader social and ethical ecosystem of Asian American literature.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian American
• care
• creative critical
• genre
• Literature
• stewardship

Acknowledgments

Our deepest gratitude goes to Arnold Pan for his generous insights and unstinting support, and to Amerasia Journal and Victor Bascara for seeing this project through. We are very grateful to the CAALS community for conceiving this issue, and to Judy Tzu-Chun Wu for believing in it in the first place. Thank you also to the Reimaginings creative-critical faculty collective at UC Santa Barbara for inspiring our thinking, and to Maile Aihua Young for help with research. Aline would like to thank Swati for her unerring and generous eye, and her astute and poetic voice; and Swati would like to thank Aline for her wisdom and discernment, and never losing sight of the people and questions that really matter.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For related theorizations, see Brandon McFarlane, Alexander Hollenberg, Hyein Lee, and Marco Cibola, “Remaking Critical Theory: A Creative Humanities Process and Intervention,” University of Toronto Quarterly 92, no. 2 (May 2023): 147–81, which reformulates creativity as criticality through cognitive science and creative humanities approaches; Mathelinda Nabugodi and Christopher Ohge, “Introduction: Provocations Toward Creative-Critical Editing,” Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation 15, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 1–10, which collates a set of provocations and opens up from them a space for creative-critical scholarly editing; and Laurie Gries, “New Materialist Ontobiography: A Critical-Creative Approach for Coping and Caring in the Chthulucene,” College English 82, no. 3 (January 2020): 301–25, which advances creative-critical pedagogy inflected by Indigenous and new materialist epistemologies. See also Jamie Skye Bianco, “Queer Creative Critical Compositionism,” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 467–77, which enacts queer creative critique through construction, inventory, and iteration.

Several recent how-to books and compilations also bridge creative and critical modalities, including Amitava Kumar, Every Day I Write the Book: Notes on Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Janelle Adsit, ed., Critical Creative Writing: Essential Readings on the Writer’s Craft (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018); Katja Hilevaara and Emily Orley, eds. The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice (New York: Routledge, 2018); and Jill Doerfler, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, eds., Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013).

2. For more on the AALF cancellation, see the Asian American Literature Festival Collective’s Linktree page, which has links to media coverage, an open letter by the Collective, and statements of support from various national and professional organizations (https://linktr.ee/aalfcollective).

3. For the uninitiated, Literaoke is a joyous celebration of music and words, combining literary readings and karaoke and has been part of AALF since its first iteration in 2017; see, for instance, Kundiman’s recap of “Ghosted World” (https://www.kundiman.org/announcements/ghosted-world-recap).

4. bell hooks, “Remembered Rapture: Dancing with Words,” JAC 20, no. 1 (2000): 1–8, 2.

5. Bakirathi Mani, Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 21. See also James Kyung-Jin Lee, Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Rachel Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); and David Leiwei Li, Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), which each provide perspectives on the politics of representation in Asian American studies.

6. Autobiographical criticism and autotheory come to mind, as well as their correlates in autofiction and speculative memoir. For a genealogy of work in these genres, organized under the recent turn to autotheory, including foundational antecedents in third world feminism and multimodal work by women of color such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, and Sylvia Wynter, see the introduction to Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021), 1–69. See also Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn, eds., Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), which collates some of the challenges of defining this work in Asian North American studies under the sign of the “beyond.”

7. See also Nabugodi and Ohge, “Introduction,” which offers a helpful overview of “a mode – and perhaps a mood” of creative-critical and post-critical writing that has re/emerged in response to institutional constraints on intellectual labor (5). For a useful genealogy of creative criticism, see also Mary Poovey, “Creative Criticism: Adaptation, Performative Writing, and the Problem of Objectivity,” Narrative 8, no. 2 (May 2000): 109–33.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aline Lo

Aline Lo is a scholar of American refugee literature and Hmong American Studies. She currently holds the position of Assistant Professor of Asian American literature at Colorado College. She has published on Hmong, Southeast Asian American, and refugee film and literature.

Swati Rana

Swati Rana is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream, which explores how social personhood and literary persona intersect. Her writing has appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, Asian American Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Journal of Asian American Studies, The Paris Review, Wasafiri, and elsewhere.