The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies by Mark Chiang

Author:Mark Chiang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2009-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

As Kang somewhat elliptically acknowledges, the status of historical knowledge seems contradictory only because her critique is political, which inevitably is normative and entails realist claims. History thus furnishes the ground for her judgments, as in the preceding “significant historical realities” or when she concludes that critical debates over Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior are “symptomatic of the problem of delineating what counts as ‘Asian American literature,’ how ‘Asian American literature’ always fails to stand for ‘Asian Americans.’”43 This conclusion depends of course on knowing who “Asian Americans” are.

Despite her rejection of referentiality, Kang’s critical method seems to repeatedly fall back on it. The other problem here is whether a recognition of the limits of historical evidence actually constitutes a critique of history as a discipline or whether it is in fact already part of the disciplinary methods of history. To fault the representation of Asian/American women in particular works of historiography is not the same as saying that history as a discipline is responsible for those misrepresentations. This whole quandary could be easily avoided simply by dropping the claim to a disciplinary critique, so the question is why Kang feels she must sustain that claim even if she struggles to specify the critique. I would argue that her commitment to antirealism and antirepresentationalism derives from her position in the academic field and is a strategy of legitimation in the primary institutional locations of her project: literary/cultural studies, Asian American studies, and women’s studies. In practice, she is able to prevent the conflict from surfacing elsewhere in the book by dividing “history” from the discipline of “History,” implying the prior existence of one before its inscription as the other, even though she explicitly disavows this possibility. As it turns out, Kang has borrowed her critique of history from Lisa Lowe’s analysis of realist representation in historiography, but as I will show, she also has borrowed from Lowe the device of splitting history in two.

Lowe’s work has been highly influential in defining an interdisciplinary model of culture as the basis for an Asian American politics. Instead of securing it in an essentialized racial or cultural identity, Lowe proposes a complex model of Asian American culture as the product of the historical contradictions of liberal capitalist democracy. In her analysis, the Asian American subject is formed in relation to citizenship as the site of contradiction between the state’s production of the national subject and the capitalist production of abstract labor power. History, then, constitutes the antiessentialist ground that enables us to theorize the basis for unifying the Asian American collectivity and culture. This is where questions immediately begin to arise, and although Lowe is cognizant of the problems, she is unable to resolve them completely. For example, Kang cites the contrast that Lowe draws between two different kinds of historiographical projects: the first is a representational project “motivated by a desire … to make visible the erased and evacuated histories in realist and naturalist modes,” whereas other projects “offer alternatives to

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