Asian American rhetorics, produced through cultural contact between Asian traditions and US English, also comprise a dynamic influence on the cultural conditions and practices within which they move. Though always interesting to linguists and "contact language" scholars, in an increasingly globalized era, these subjects are of interest to scholars in a widening range of disciplines—especially those in rhetoric and writing studies.
Mao, Young, and their contributors propose that Asian American discourse should be seen as a spacious form, one that deliberately and selectively incorporates Asian “foreign-ness” into the English of Asian Americans. These authors offer the concept of a dynamic “togetherness-in-difference” as a way to theorize the contact and mutual influence. Chapters here explore a rich diversity of histories, theories, literary texts, and rhetorical practices. Collectively, they move the scholarly discussion toward a more nuanced, better balanced, critically informed representation of the forms of Asian American rhetorics and the cultural work that they do.
REPRESENTATIONS
Doing Asian American RhetoricUTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-724-7Contents
Foreword by Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner................................................................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments.........................................................................................................................................................................................................xivIntroduction: Performing Asian American Rhetoric into the American Imaginary............................................................................................................................................11 Transnational Asian American Rhetoric as a Diasporic Practice Rory Ong..............................................................................................................................................252 Reexamining the Between-Worlds Trope in Cross-Cultural Composition Studies Tomo Hattori and Stuart Ching............................................................................................................413 Asian American Rhetorical Memory and a "Memory That Is Only Sometimes Our Own" Haivan V. Hoang......................................................................................................................624 Listening for Legacies; or, How I Began to Hear Dorothy Laigo Cordova, the Pinay behind the Podium Known as FANHS Terese Guinsatao Monberg..........................................................................835 Learning Authenticity: Pedagogies of Hindu Nationalism in North America Subhasree Chakravarty.......................................................................................................................1066 Relocating Authority: Coauthor(iz)ing a Japanese American Ethos of Resistance under Mass Incarceration Mira Chieko Shimabukuro......................................................................................1277 Rhetoric of the Asian American Self: Influences of Region and Social Class on Autobiographical Writing Robyn Tasaka.................................................................................................1538 "Artful Bigotry and Kitsch": A Study of Stereotype, Mimicry, and Satire in Asian American T-Shirt Rhetoric Vincent N. Pham and Kent A. Ono..........................................................................1759 Beyond "Asian American" and Back: Coalitional Rhetoric in Print and New Media Jolivette Mecenas.....................................................................................................................19810 On the Road with P. T. Barnum's Traveling Chinese Museum: Rhetorics of Public Reception and Self-Resistance in the Emergence of Literature by Chinese American Women Mary Louise Buley-Meissner.....................21811 Rereading Sui Sin Far: A Rhetoric of Defiance Bo Wang...............................................................................................................................................................24412 Margaret Cho, Jake Shimabukuro, and Rhetorics in a Minor Key Jeffrey Carroll........................................................................................................................................26613 "Maybe I Could Play a Hooker in Something!" Asian American Identity, Gender, and Comedy in the Rhetoric of Margaret Cho Michaela D. E. Meyer........................................................................27914 Learning Asian American Affect K. Hyoejin Yoon......................................................................................................................................................................293Afterword: Toward a Theory of Asian American Rhetoric: What Is to Be Done?..............................................................................................................................................323Index...................................................................................................................................................................................................................333Contributors............................................................................................................................................................................................................338
Chapter One
TRANSNATIONAL ASIAN AMERICAN RHETORIC AS A DIASPORIC PRACTICE Rory Ong
Too often, the dilemma for resident Asians in the United States, Pacific Islanders, and multigenerational Asian Americans centers on explaining away their disparate (dis)placements or (dis)positions in the national American narrative. Transnationalism has fast become one rhetorical commonplace that attempts to resolve these discontinuities that have been historically engendered by geopolitical and economic border crossings, the impact of global trade, and a growing global economy. Some of the earliest discussions around transnationalism and Asia Pacific focused on the economic reforms occurring in newly industrialized countries like China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand (Cummings 1998). The emphasis was on the consistency and like-mindedness of so-called miracle Asian economies and their citizen workforce, which adopted western values of trade, commerce, and consumption. However, alternative scholarship on the Asian diaspora (Chow 1993; Dirlik 1998; HuDehart 1999; Ang 2001; Grewal 2005) has begun to articulate a transnationalism that takes stock of disparate and uneven Asian transcontinental and transoceanic crossings in order to illumine the contradictions and inconsistencies in im/migrant Asian lives and identities.
One of the difficulties in articulating a rhetoric particular to the Asian diaspora in the United States has to do with its multivalency and the long history of an Asian habitus in the West. An Asian habitus is produced from overlapping and embedded quotidian relations involving the sociohistorical, political, and economic structures that thread the material interlacing of daily life and human agency. This also accounts for the complicity of Asian diasporic subjects, whose various articulations of material life are sutured to quotidian systems and structures of classification such as language, immigration legislation, and economic policies as well as to racial formations, sociopolitical arrangements, and distributions of power. An Asian habitus, therefore, involves the everyday practices, discourses, and cultural lore invented in conjunction with the material conditions of multigenerational and transnational Asian Americans whose lives, as Lisa Lowe points out, are "juridically legislated, territorially situated, and culturally embodied" (1996, 2). Lowe particularly refers to the ways in which the architecture of U.S. citizenship, the systemic exclusion and alienation of Asians in the United States, and the militarization and colonization of the Pacific have contributed to the national imagination of Asia, and Asians, in an American empire (4-5). Such a habitus is replete with diasporic identities and cultural practices that are in tense and uneven relation to a western hegemony that is delineated around U.S. conceptualizations of national affiliation, territory, and economic and military dominance across Asia and the Pacific. An Asian habitus accordingly produces a hybridized and heterogeneous transnational and transcultural way of life to negotiate the moral and ethical valuations that encode Asians in the West. A rhetoric that is in tandem with an Asian habitus would, therefore, have to contend with the multiple and incongruous Asian communities-those long-standing, those newly arrived, as well as mobile transnational communities-now inhabiting the geographical, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural axes in the States, in its territories, and perhaps across the Americas.
The heterogeneous identities and practices that an Asian habitus generates have resulted in some differing opinions regarding how to fully comprehend Asian American daily lives, let alone what might constitute their rhetorics. While some scholars have pointed to the maintenance of ethnic, kinship, and national ties, others point to the practice of family and political organizations to bring about community solidarity. Many, however, continue to look to the expansion of economic, transportation, and communication networks and to the growth of entrepreneurial elites in a global economy as factors that preserve an Asian cultural continuity (Anderson and Lee 2005, 8-10). In spite of these popular trends, a critical Asian diaspora scholarship has been developing that interrogates the nationalist and essentialist agendas that underlie the fact that "for Asian populations across the Americas, ethnic and diasporic identities and practices exist not simply in uneasy tension with each other, but are caught between nation-states and their national agendas" (10). The complex material conditions and the transnational intersections that compile an Asian habitus and the production of diasporic lives and cultural practices are in many ways complicit with the national projects of western colonizing nation-states. Robbie Goh reminds us that such an understanding of cultural practice "is not only true of the formerly colonized nation, but also of migrants, immigrant societies, and global diasporic contexts ... which can be found beyond the nation, among the ethnically diverse, transnationally oriented citizens of contemporary global zones" (2004, 6). Coming to terms with the historicomaterial conditions of an Asian habitus recasts the Asian diaspora amid the ongoing debates around nationalism, citizenship, white supremacy, immigration, globalization, and the war on terror in the United States. A rhetoric and rhetorical practice specific to that of an Asian diaspora in the United States must, therefore, account for the dialectical relationship of its habitus with western structures of domination.
ASIAN AMERICAN "AUTODOCUMENTARY" AS A TRANSNATIONAL RHETORIC
With the uneven movement of Asian communities across Asian and Pacific continents and oceans as part of a U.S. economic and cultural hegemony in circulation, transnational Asian American rhetorical practices have already begun to materialize. These have taken the form of cultural projects across a variety of disciplines and everyday cultural practices that engage in the reinvention, rearticulation, and rememory of transmigrations, particularly as they expose the Asian diaspora in relation to western expansion rather than mere cultural travel or sharing across national borders (see Chen 1998; Abbas and Erni 2005; Lim et al. 2006). Some of these undertakings might be considered rhetorical projects which, by their very telling, are closer to life narratives or testimonio. Testimonio, as Caren Kaplan writes, "is a form of 'resistance literature'; it expresses transitional material relations in neo- and postcolonial societies and disrupts mainstream literary conventions.... testimonio may refer to colonial values of nostalgia and exoticization, values that operate via a discourse of truth and authenticity" (1992, 122-123). The exposure of, and interruption in, cultural nostalgia and exoticization can both be understood as a product of the transnational work of life narratives as they cross the genres of ethnography and autobiography with colonial subjugation, something that Mary Louise Pratt (1991) has referred to as autoethnography.
Autoethnography, as Pratt theorizes, is a hybrid text that formerly colonized subjects created by merging metropolitan discourses with indigenous idioms. These hybrid discourses invent self-representations that challenge dominant metropolitan forms of understanding by providing an alternative framework for discursive practices to draw from colonial contexts and conditions that interrupt the colonial episteme. In order to do this, Pratt depends on the preserved indigeneity of a colonial subject's idioms to alter the subordination by, and thus the privilege of, the colonizers. By virtue of the remnant indigeneity of their idioms, Pratt's autoethnographers challenge their colonial imbrication. Their indigenous idiomatic infiltration into the hegemony creates a discord within the colonial process, and thus intervenes in the production of colonial discourses and power relations.
To the contrary, Asian American subjects wrestle with the concomitant production of their subjectivity and rhetorical practice (their idioms) in relation to colonial productions of discourse and power relations. Their very hybridity, produced by their multigenerational and transnational identities, complicates any notion of an indigenous cultural or idiomatic prerogative. In fact, Asian American subjectivity is in relation to the territorial expansion, the overwhelming military and economic power, and the legislative hegemony of an expanding American empire, all of which underwrites the rhetoric of an Asian diaspora in the United States. An Asian American diaspora and its discourses are entangled with the cultural flows across the Pacific, which have been fetishized as cultural commodities, conscripted as labor, or have served as proxies of western values through either a military or a global capitalist economy.
In the last decade, several projects have emerged in the form of life-narrative documentaries depicting an Asian American diaspora within these encumbered conditions. Bontoc Eulogy by Marlon Fuentes (1995), Xich-lo by M. Trinh Nguyen (1996), and First Person Plural by Deann Borshay Liem (2000) are examples of such projects. Though uneven, inconsistent, and certainly not incontrovertible, these life narratives parse out a critical practice that is produced from their representation of competing and contradictory subjects living within the bureaucratic apparatus of a colonial or imperial nation-state. They disclose the construction of Asian American subjects, their everyday lives and discourses, in the midst of a colonial and imperial scheme, and articulate discordant discourses that reflect the tension-filled spaces (the disorientation) of transAsian, transPacific, and transAmerican identities. Moreover, rather than frame these life-narrative documentaries as autoethnographies that look to indigenous idioms as a means of resistance and critique, we might think of them as Asian American autodocumentaries-critical and self-reflexive visual representations that illustrate an Asian habitus through diasporic idioms. Unlike indigenous idioms, diasporic idioms are commonplaces constitutive of a U.S. colonial and imperial hegemony that cloak the scattered communities of Asians in America. Through their use of diasporic idioms, Asian American autodocumentaries reimagine and revalue commonplace markers with the tensions and contradictions of transnational border-crossing subjects, and in this way give shape to the counterhegemonic narrative of a diasporic rhetorical practice. For example, they (1) reimagine and revalue the commonplace of nation by identifying it with western colonial and imperial involvement across the Asia Pacific region and with the scattering of Asian and Pacific communities; (2) reimagine and revalue the commonplace of community as constitutive, yet critically self-reflexive, of western colonial culture; and (3) reimagine and revalue the commonplace of family through the very tensions and contradictions that their heterogeneous Asian American location engenders.
First, Asian American autodocumentaries reimagine and revalue their relation to the commonplace of nation. They characterize the extent to which western colonization and empire building in the Asia Pacific region has played a significant role in the deployment of an Asian diaspora and Asians' transnational life stories. We can see this in Marlon Fuentes's Bontoc Eulogy, for example, as he imagines his Filipino grandfather as Markod, the legendary Bontoc warrior who disappeared after he came to the United States in the early 1900s (see Feng 2002, 25-33). Because very little is known about his grandfather outside of a fragmented family narrative, Fuentes combines old archival footage with contemporary reenactments to visualize what might have been his ancestor's narrative in the United States. As he pieces this story together, Fuentes wonders if Markod was among those Filipinos who were brought to the United States as part of the Philippine exhibit for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. He reminds us that the Philippines had been colonized by Spain, becoming a U.S. territory only a year after the Spanish-American War, once the United States had silenced the remains of the Philippine revolution (see Bonus 2000). After its conquest by the United States, the Philippines became highly valued as a geopolitical spoil of war, but it also became valued as a new dependent nation of the "white man's burden" and a spectacle of subjugation for the fair's attendants. While the Philippine exhibit provided the pretense of cultural difference and respect for "our brown brothers from across the Pacific"(Fuentes 1995), in reality it exoticized and commodified Fuentes's imagined patriarch and all those brought in from across the Philippine Galapagos. It is through the reimagination of his grandfather as Markod that we envision the imprint of colonial hegemony, which led to the dissociation and displacement of the Philippines as a nation as well as to the cultural fragmentation and configuration of a Filipino diaspora in the national space of the United States.
Similarly, M. Trinh Nguyen associates her national displacement and diasporic imagination with the French and U.S. occupation of Vietnam. In Xich-lo she records her return visit to relatives in Hanoi many years after relocating to the United States with her family. Like Fuentes, Nguyen recounts this mobile history by combining old film footage with more contemporary footage she shoots during her return. She emphasizes her transient consciousness by being filmed on the move, either on a xich-lo (bicycle taxi) or on a moving train, while she narrates. As she moves about the city and countryside, Nguyen recounts her family's national status when they were in Vietnam and reveals that they were of the educated and cultural elite. We learn, for example, that prior to coming to the United States, she and her siblings were schooled by French missionaries, and that her father worked as a military consultant for U.S. forces and was well paid for his services. She also remembers that her family was visited by high-ranking U.S. military officers, who brought expensive gifts for the children. Nguyen tries to remember something about her background that is not laced with a colonial presence, whether French or American. She finds, however, that her most prevalent memories of national belonging are in relation to her French education and Catholic religion, which are compounded by the violence in the landscape around her, and none more so than her father's involvement with U.S. military operations in Vietnam.
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