아시안/아메리칸/아시안 아메리칸

Asian/ American/ Asian American: What Is Asian American Literature to "Us"?

Concurring with global framings of Asian American cultural productions and their increasing impact on literary studies in Korean academia, not a few Korean scholars and students have been recently initiated into the field of Asian American literature. This change is hailed for a very salutary purpose because it helps Korean scholars reterritorialize single-nation genealogies and mono-national narratives in the conceptualization of American culture. It also helps them develop a critical consciousness to situate themselves within a broader understanding of the (Asian) American experience in a globally interconnected, racialized, and capitalist United States. However, it is still hard to assert that Korean scholars have developed any critical consciousness, with which they can find themselves on various sides of issues and make sense of their fluid, seemingly contradictory positions in reading Asian American literature. While it is meaningful to shake ourselves out of apathy and into taking a stand by finding a “common ground” based upon strong racial, cultural, historial, and lingual affinities with Asian America, it also runs a risk of reiterating a neat alignment of identity and knowledge production−an analogy between knowledge of subjects and the subject of knowledge. What is needed, then, is to relocate our own placement from which we read Asian American literature. Are the “Asian American” that we appropriate in reading Asian American literature and the “Asian American” interpellated by U.S.-based scholars identical? How is the latter constructed and contested vis-à-vis our own discursive loci “here”and “now”? How can Asian America speak for the “Asian American” without re-consolidating the borders and contours of the “Asian American” as an uncritically “American” identification? With these questions in mind, I attempt to bring into sharp relief the ways in which we can make sense of local, national, and global aspects of Asian American literature by examining how “our” own Asian American literature and Asian America’s Asian American literature can recognize the reciprocity of each other’s gaze without redeeming each side's narcissistic gestures in the name of broadening the field beyond the confines and constraints of the local, the national, and the global.