Having supported Asian American arts and letters for over 50 years, Amerasia Journal has fostered and encouraged a mutually reinforcing relationship between creativity and critique, the apt keywords in the title of this special-topic double issue, guest edited by Aline Lo and Swati Rana. From its very beginnings, Amerasia Journal has provided a venue for Asian American creative writers to present their work, often before wider audiences and the literary marketplace gave them the recognition due to them. Yet critical engagement with creative work has never trailed far behind literary achievements in Amerasia Journal. While longtime editor Russell Leong is known best as a poet and promoter of the literary arts, he also made space for critics to add context and richness to understand Asian American literature and, in so doing, helped to forge the field of Asian American literary studies during his over three-decade term at the helm. Flip through the pages of Amerasia Journal or scroll through the table of contents on our online repository to find so many now familiar names contributing their works as creative writers, critics, writers who became critics, and critics who became writers. Notice, too, how Amerasia Journal served as a publishing platform not only for inventive works of Asian American literature, but also criticism that delved into those writings and literary historical excavations that unearthed a legacy which they became a part of.
It is in this tradition that we publish this double issue entitled “Creativity and Critique in Asian American Literature.” Even as Amerasia Journal has continued to bolster creativity and critique, there has not been, surprisingly enough, an issue primarily devoted to literature recently, as fiction, poetry, and literary criticism in the journal have been published in projects exploring new thematic interests and emerging geographical focal points. Certainly, it has been too long, as so many emerging writers and new areas of inquiry have come to fore in just the past few years. To catch up, we hope that placing the creative and the critical together in this special issue promises to open up new connections and possibilities for investigating and appreciating Asian American literature. Whether creativity and critique are supplementing one another or are put in tension, the relationship between them is a dynamic one that pushes forward a field that is ever developing and redefining itself beyond what might have been imagined before in the archives of Amerasia Journal.