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.
When we took on the opportunity to co-edit a special issue that would focus entirely on Asian American literature, we were equally excited and apprehensive about how to “correctly” frame such a fluid and ever-expanding field. This challenge was compounded by the fact that we did not know each other very well and, so, did not really understand each other’s current interests. At a glance, we work in different areas of Asian American literature, with Aline in Southeast Asian American and critical refugee studies and Swati in Asian American and comparative ethnic studies. We also work at different types of institutions that require fairly divergent acts of negotiation in order to secure our livelihoods. This story of struggling with uncertainty and division is, for many of us, the story of how we have come to navigate the institutionalization of Asian American literary studies. It is quite common to stumble through alone and unsure before you meet the people whom you can trust with your deep questions, before you learn to build community with each other. Even then, you can find yourself being restricted to parts of the field or to one primary mode of writing.
Our shared connection to the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies (CAALS) meant, however, that we were both committed to the agency of the literary and to creating spaces that are welcoming and supportive, and open to the entropies and pleasures of collaboration. This common ground helped us discover a shared question: what could be possible if we invited contributors to weave together creative and critical work, if creativity and critique were not, as they so often are, held apart from one another? We sought to organize this issue not around theme but around modality, to open it up to multi-genre and multimodal work that might not be legible elsewhere. For us, this special double issue is not meant to circumscribe or prescribe how we think and write about Asian American literature. Rather, we wanted to explore an alternative mode, one that encourages us to hear (and be heard), read (and be read), and see (and be seen) differently, to be in dialogue with each other and with all parts of ourselves.
Ways of joining
When we as Asian Americanists bring together creativity and critique, we face several questions. First, the question of how to order our terms. Creative critical. Critical creative. What moves us to place one before the other? The conventions of alphabetization? A sense of their sequencing? A conviction as to their priority?
Second, the question of how to join our terms. The conjunction does a particular kind of work in our call for papers, inviting contributors to join with us to join creativity and critique in pursuit of further conjunctions. Enlisting the varied nuances and lengths of hyphens and dashes (as palpable ligatures) also proves satisfying. Especially now, as we write this at the end of the process of editing and curating the special issue, we think we might have enough to go on to bring before you the creative-critical, linked as compound; or the creative–critical, denoting the range of up to and including everything in between; or the creative — critical, grammatically wrong but right in its bravado, its emphasis, its stopping us in our tracks and bringing out something different. Then there is the forward slash that expresses interchangeability, disjuncture; or, more to the point, makes lines out of the concept and thus a poem in two words, announcing its own enigma, soliciting more interpretations.
Or a potential recourse to the space between creative critical, which feels exciting and unpredictable, and ready (in a simple yet open way), for what your attention and your reading might offer.Footnote1
Third, the question of specificity, of deeper and of broader modification. How to think particularly through Asian Americanist creativity and critique, to express their prepositional relation to (in) Asian American literature? One way to get at this is to ask how the hyphenation of the creative-critical compound speaks to the oftentimes hyphenated construction of Asian America, and to ask what becomes possible when the space between these modalities and identities is cleared.
To add another prepositional linkage to the present of our call and this publication, what of this work now, during our shared, yet differential present with its perils and its promise? Confronting gendered anti-Asian violence, the mounting devastation of climate change, and the deepening injustices of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, even as a groundswell of global protest regenerates abolitionist horizons and demands redress for genocide, enslavement, and colonization, what is the agency of Asian American creativity and critique? When we clear space on the page or screen, we sit with what sustains us, enriches our understanding of Asian America, and sharpens our sense of the work literature does in the world. How does the expressive synergy of creativity and critique recalibrate our relationship to the past and answer the exigencies of our moment?
In the aftermath of the sudden cancellation by the Smithsonian of the 2023 Asian American “Ghost World” Literature Festival (AALF), these questions feel all the more meaningful. Some of the work of this special issue happened in anticipation of the festival, as we joined Asian American literary arts organizations and organizers in the course of their conceptual planning for the event and transcribed the text of our roundtable for the final piece of this issue (“Going Back to the Basement”). The leadership of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, citing poor planning, unilaterally decided to cancel AALF mere weeks before its opening with little to no explanation; this charge has been roundly disputed by the festival planning team and collaborators who attribute the cancellation to longstanding issues involving top-down decision making, hostile labor conditions, and censorship.Footnote2
As we sit in the shadow of the gathering that did not take place, organizers and participants have devised other ways to come together. In one iteration, “Ghosted World: An Uncanceled Asian American Literature Festival” acted as both a wake and a parturition, heavy with sadness and frustration at what could have been, while gleeful with celebration for what has and will nonetheless come about. The renamed gathering rests on a play on words, a creative critique in itself that was not lost on attendees who came ready to exorcize harmful demons, to comfort one another, to rally together against the abrupt disappearance of an institutional body, and, most importantly, to take part in the ancient ceremony that is Literaoke.Footnote3 The center is and always will be the relationship between literature and the community that it forms and that informs it. To transform a ghost world into a ghosted world is to be creative critical for that is where we can rename ourselves, change shapes to suit our needs.
Overview of contributions
We do not make our way through this enumeration of questions and possibilities as through a thicket to pull the clear thread of an answer. In fact, we mean not to choose from among these conjectures the definitive expression of creativity and critique but rather to describe variations on their linkages, to develop a lexicon for the possibilities that this special issue opens up. The collected work before you is multi-genre and multimodal, encompassing interviews, roundtables, and colloquies, in prose and poem form; graphic and scholarly memoir; poetry, both lyric and prose; variations on the essay, from literary critical to autobiographical to autotheory; as well as several genres-in-the-making, including (what might be provisionally called) sonic liner notes, stop-motion reading, creative scholarship, and visual notetaking. You will find here work by academics, curators, editors, educators, independent scholars, organizers, poets, visual artists, and writers whose scaffolding is broad and eclectic, encompassing contemporary poetics, queer theory, narrative medicine, posthuman studies, and women of color feminism, to name just a few coordinates.
In ordering this work, we have sought to bring you through formally and generically diverging itineraries that nonetheless converge around particular themes. The issue begins with embodiment, illness, and sexual violence, and different ways of conversing, drawing, sensing, and writing alongside (“Sense and Embodiment”). Contributions then move through history and recovery: the work of writing oneself into the archive and filling in gaps using scholarly figuration and critical imagination (“Figuring History”). Next, the issue comes to inhabit boundaries of literary, sonic, and visual genres, where synesthesia extends and develops Asian American epistemologies (“Boundless Forms”). We close with the roundtable of artists, literary arts organizations, and organizers – convened, in part, to plan for AALF – who tackle some of the core questions of the special issue and take us through creativity and critique into the social and ethical ecosystem of Asian American literature (“This Living Archive”).
Juxtaposition has brought with it the gifts of articulation. You’ll find pieces that lean more heavily into the critical while relying on the creative and that, vice versa, lean more heavily into the creative while relying on the critical; as well as pieces that reach for new, combinative forms, interrogating the boundaries of genre and of discipline. Together they constitute what Yanyi describes in the roundtable as the “merging of critical creations and creative critiques.” Setting creative and critical modalities alongside one another, we find ourselves in a double issue, pushing not only against limits of length but against mechanisms for review, revision, and production. The double – and dual – work of the creative and the critical thus transforms the horizon of expectations of the academic journal special issue itself. This work is epistemological and structural, rethinking what counts as disciplinary knowledge in Asian American studies and reworking the processes whereby this knowledge is made and disseminated. “Refusing to accept these distinctions” between creative and critical writing, as bell hooks tells us, “was and remains a rebellious act, one that can challenge and disrupt hierarchical structures rooted in a politics of domination both within the academy and in the world outside.”Footnote4
Suppositions for a start
Here, we would like to draw out a set of suppositions from the contributions themselves that speak to the convergence of creativity and critique in Asian American studies. The first centers on representation and supposes that in the space between the creative and critical representation becomes less blunt and instrumental and thus more generative for Asian Americanist work. As Bakirathi Mani writes in her study of South Asian diasporic photography, “[f]or Asian Americanists, the work of representation is tied up with a politics of racial visibility: an epistemological orientation toward the revelation of minoritized subjects in the public sphere.”Footnote5 What happens to this orientation when representation presents as an art assemblage? In this issue, the seams show in the white space between the contributions and within their distinct mediums. Unable to settle into any one way of reading, the reader arrives at Asian American representation (assuming they get there at all) by piecing it together across multimodal projects and through cross-genre reading in what is likely to be a disorienting experience.
We suspect there is something about the formal involutions and extrusions of the pieces in this special issue – like a crumpled paper being unfolded and, even so, folding back on itself – that resists the “revelation” of representation. Nancy Kang’s poems, “Strawberry Shade” and “Arrival: 1965” pivot around male, racialized, working-class immigrants on the cusp of the 1965 generation while pulling apart their subject through metaphorical violence, involving both violent metaphors (“the gold necklace” at once a “medal” and a “collar” and “the singing twine/of an electrified fence”) and the fundamental violence of metaphor that posits likenesses with no basis in likeness. In a corollary to this work, Maile Aihua Young’s deft readings of Asian American speculative poetry (by Franny Choi and Margaret Rhee) in “Sensuous Machines” reveal an “alternative sensory apparatus” that, through its very opacity and inscrutability, circumvents liberal humanist logics of representation and presents alternatives to a future that simply replicates and mechanizes the sexualized, racialized body. What happens when literary analysis draws conclusions alongside poems that enact similar conclusions? And when the visual register also presents, as with Helen Zhong’s “Roots,” which quite literally draws the protagonist into their mother’s and grandmother’s experience of poverty, civil war, and social upheaval, measuring this generational trauma against their own, and detouring once again through metaphor (the “leaky faucet,” the “roaring waterfall”) as a way to enter into Asian American representation? To read across these contributions is to allow for vagaries of representation across poetic, narrative, and visual registers. It is to perform a different “work of representation” that must make sense of variability and grapple with the possibility that this might have been said or shown differently, drawn out as an image, exfoliated as critique, or written out as verse. Withholding singularity, in this sense, the creative critical project withholds easy representability.
We must, of course, still insist on representation, but a form of representation that is born of and refined through the exchange between the creative and the critical, that moves beyond mere revelation. Talitha Angelica Acaylar Trazo’s visual notes and their afterlives on social media attest in “Visual Notetaking as Asian American Art Practice” to the exigency of Asian American representation, the precarity that stems from being underrepresented. We, ourselves, have been troubled by the lack of representation of South Asian American and Hmong American writing in this issue, signaling our own complicated attachments to and doubts about what it means to be made visible, to be disclosed, revealed unto the world. Yet, that is the ruse of representation, to make one passive, to believe that one’s presence will undo systemic erasure and exclusion. This trap of representation can be boiled down to one simple, yet resonant question, posed by Neelanjana Banerjee in the roundtable: “If these [Asian American] books are out there and our stories are being celebrated in such diverse ways, then why are we still feeling the same way or arguably worse than we did twenty years ago?” One answer, of course, is that we cannot rely on the kind of representation that must be anointed by liberal humanist or market logics that ask for work that is readily consumable, for creativity partitioned from the critical. Trazo’s visual notes document the importance of representation in and through the development of “critical consciousness.” To enlist both the creative and the critical is to reclaim representation so that it is transformative for those who need it the most.
Our second supposition is that the bridge between the creative and the critical also bridges autobiography and art. As Trazo’s preamble shows, linking visual notetaking to the Asian American bildung, the artist statement already serves this role. That we find this movement repeated in critical essays as well as poetry suggests that the creative-critical concatenation is permissive in this respect, that contributors get creative about their critique and critical about their creativity partly via recourse to the autobiographical. Something about this conjuncture allows authors to write themselves into their work. This is a version of the freedom students find hard to accept in our classrooms when they ask, incredulously, are you sure I can say I? Mai-Linh Hong’s “Nothing but My Own Whole Body” acts as witness to and interlocutor for the life and work of Violet Kazue de Cristoforo and the radical, multiracial history and potential of haiku in the shared context of the precarious ecosystem of the California Central Valley that links both writers. How else to excavate the, often violent, lineages from which we emerge, not as fully formed scholars but as complex, fluid readers and writers and, dare we add, mothers, whose children press out of and upon our bodies and around the edges of the page? In “A Pale Persephone,” Angie Sijun Lou retraces Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s life and work through her own, mapping her grandmother’s dreams onto her dreams onto the critic’s dreams of retrieval, as if by salvaging her personal inheritance, she may also salvage Cha’s literary inheritance. Floyd Cheung’s “Sylvia’s Darlings with Commentary” intersperses unpublished fragments of Sylvia Plath’s writing with fragments of his family’s immigration history, mapping the constraints of archival recovery onto the constraints of diasporic recovery: “To recover can mean to bring back from obscurity or to obscure again.”
Whose “darlings” are these and whose “whole body”? Is “pale Persephone” the ghost of the dead writer or the many ghosts of the living? “It’s true that we can’t bring Persephone back from Hades, but her disappearance gives us the spring,” Lou writes. All around us new genres are being made of this bold traffic between artist and art, and they are being made here in this special issue inasmuch as our contributors are compelled by the imperative to innovate.Footnote6 To us, however, the contributions in this special issue find a deeper compulsion in the Asian American archive itself, which demands that authors write about the dead through the living, that they trace literary genealogies through their own ancestral genealogies. The creative-critical bridge draws our authors to acknowledge their own stories and seasons, their own bodies and investments. Thus emboldened, the creative-critical “I” makes visible the linkages between the author and the work. This transparency functions counterintuitively, to clear space for multiplicity. Moved by authors as characters within their writing, we need not only follow analytical (or poetical) argumentative lines but may also follow the many interconnected plotlines of authorial life that generate their own rich and engaging ruminations.
Third, we suppose getting creative and critical permits us to feel our bodies in relation to our work and, further, to grow attuned to the embodied life of archives in the making all around us. Refiguring the ailing body, Ching-In Chen’s poem “Growth & Fester” counterposes multifarious, racialized, and generational embodiment against a medical establishment that insistently diagnoses and procedurally dissects: “A body may not be there, but demands witness.” In the roundtable, Yanyi brings us through “the creative and critical as two sides of the same spectrum of thinking and feeling” to the “living archive,” reminding us that our “connections” and “conversations” are co-constituted and can be reconstituted. Such a living, breathing archive is both textual and embodied, needing fluidly creative-critical curation – an ontological epistemology of breath and of flesh. “Who Is the We in Diaspora?” answers this urgency, as Jonathan Jae-an Crisman and Jacqueline Barrios array a pastiche of transcriptions, context, and commentary around affect, identification, genealogy, and community in the wake of the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings and in the course of the rise of anti-Asian hate during the COVID pandemic. This is “a choric space for communal pause and remembrance,” born of the informal and established organizing spaces of an ad hoc diasporic family. These “liner notes” to a Digital Salon podcast episode are the beginnings of an archive, a self-actualization that boldly establishes “the work’s claim to its own futurity.” Likewise, Thaomi Michelle Dinh and Seo-Young Chu in “You Are Invited” enjoin readers to “imagine what else we can speculate and create: a whisper network that is both in/visible and in/audible,” that hears, holds, and bears witness to survivors of sexual violence. Thus, we are opened to different modes of discernment and documentation that reverberate beyond this attempt at curation. To the page, reconfigured around talking and listening, attaches all that cannot be written down for posterity, all that evades capture and becomes the living archive of the special issue itself.
From this follows our fourth supposition: that by combining forces, creativity and critique transform generic boundaries that are also epistemological and structural boundaries, arrayed by institutional power. Together, Clara Chin’s “Living Life as a Text/tile,” Amanda Su’s “Reputed Natives of Formosa,” and Emily Yoon’s “Once Upon a Queer Time,” test the limits of genre with a view to broadening the limits of critique. “Being a textile is a mode of creating, understanding historical violence and the violence of the everyday, a way of living on without forgetting,” Chin posits, refiguring the artist-critic as textile and the movement of squares of fabric before the camera’s lens as a movement in and through Orientalism into Asian Americanist critique. Su considers how to reckon with “the falsehoods that came to shape history and provision [her] reality,” grappling with the construction of Formosa (present-day Taiwan) under the gaze of evangelism, imperialism, and primitivism by building out of fraudulent memoirs and fabricated journals an alternative in creative scholarship. Yoon explores how the queer temporalities of Krys Lee’s stories, looped through their queer erotics, rewrite the normative arcs of the fairy tale and the bildungsroman, clearing the way through received genres as “we wait to be dazzled by a reimagined tomorrow.”
“We need new genres in academia,” Dinh and Chu tell us, counterposing “softness and sensitivity” – as “vital skills, not just life skills, but academic skills, intellectual skills” – to the norms of academic training and writing.Footnote7 We felt this need as we called for contributions to this special issue and as we compiled it, working to parse submissions that defied the constraints of the academic journal, overspilling not only the process of review but also (at times) of production. How to attribute keywords, abstract audacity, fit multimodal capaciousness sensibly to the algorithms of the search engine? In this, we found help from our contributors whose work anticipated our difficulties and fears and demanded that we be bold, nimble, and generous – in a word, creative-critical – in our efforts to curate and find a home for work that seemed to us to have been waiting for just such a call. The roundtable is rich with resources helping us to dismantle old habits of critique and find new ways to connect and support one another: to recognize rigor as gatekeeping, following Mimi Khúc, with a view to “expand what counts as rigor and how to do intellectual work in different modes”; to reframe the “scarcity mentality,” following Devyn Manibo, as “a mentality of abundance, reclaiming the institution as a platform for risk, and in that risk supporting each other”; and to emplace stewardship “in people, and in small arts organizations” instead of “large institutions like publishing houses, but also like the Smithsonian, or the academy,” following Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis. This chorus echoes other contributions to this volume that speak with a shared voice, loosening aesthetic and structural strangleholds.
Closing with care
Finally, we suppose that – taken together – creativity and critique also entail thinking together, talking together, and writing together in collaborative care and stewardship of our archives, of one another, and of Asian American literary and creative arts. We need only look at Lou’s interweaving of family’s stories into her analysis of Cha’s work; Cheung’s parsing of childhood memories, the joys and trials of academia, and contemporary racial politics through words and snippets from Plath’s papers; and Chin’s detailing of how a reading practice can blossom into an embodied art practice to see that care with and for our archives also entails care for ourselves and for our (inherited and chosen) families. The creative-critical invites us into relationships with our literary and literary critical antecedents that are neither exploitative nor hemmed in by discovery, where experimentation and innovation are not ends in themselves but spurred by the appeal of this invitation. This is not about claiming newness, as Kazim Ali reminds us in the roundtable, offering an eclectic, impromptu literary history of creative-critical writing in Asian American and ethnic studies. How might we clear the way for recognition of work that has always been happening, and build our capacity to restore already existing creative-critical genealogies?
The roundtable brings this question squarely into the realm of how we relate to one another within the ecosystem of Asian American literary and creative arts. Caroline Kyungah Hong takes us back to the founding of CAALS and its mission to build a warm and joyful community, asking that we similarly “approach critique and creativity as acts of collective care and love.” To think about creative-critical collaboration in this way not only puts pressure on received notions of rigor and models of scarcity that divide us, but also encourages us to realign our shared commitment to reading and writing as community building. Mai-Linh Hong’s discussion of haiku kais and the role these writing clubs played in fostering community serves as something of a touchstone, as does Davis’s model of collective stewardship that undergirds the work of the participants in the roundtable and that of the many individuals and organizations involved in planning AALF.
We have aimed to build from and affirm these models of collective care in our work with each other and with individual pieces in this issue. Coming up against personal limitations has meant being open to the fullness and complexity that we all embody and acknowledging the structural and procedural limitations that we face. For Aline, this has meant approaching writing, in all its forms, as a creative act, and working from a place of possibility and abundance. For Swati, this has meant learning to let go of colonial tutelage and bring different parts (scholar, poet, mother) together, trusting that each enriches the other. As co-editors, we have striven to find articulation within the juxtaposition of creativity and critique. We are grateful to our contributors who have helped us in this work and enriched the space between the creative and the critical, and we hope that as you read you share our thanks.
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).
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.
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.