This book introduces Asian American literary studies by engaging the
conditions, contingencies, and immediate and long-term effects of its
major debates. Two rationales inform Ling's presentation of the field in
this way: first is a felt need to provide recognizable contours and
trajectories for the evolution of Asian American criticism as an
ethnic-specific minoritarian formation in the United States; second is
an imperative to historicize its practices - including polemics,
controversies, and ideological ruptures - as an ongoing negotiation
undertaken by Asian American critics for a more self-conscious and more
adequate representation of the field's interests. These rationales are
fully contextualized in the book's Introduction and Conclusion.
The main body of this study is organized non-chronologically into 8
chapters, with each designed to reflect how the field has been energized
by its demographic transformation, its growing intellectual
heterogeneity, its defining moments, and its cross-cutting relationship
with the trends in other disciplines. What has emerged and been given
prominence to in the surveys and discussions of this book then
constitute the essential criticism of Asian American literary studies, a
discourse almost 5 decades in the making when examined retrospectively.
