Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: citizenship nullification, uniform subjectivity, nikkei internment, United States, Asian American, Filipino America (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Kandice Chuh argues that in the current study of Asian Americans, the critique of social inequality must overcome the impossible insistence on a uniform ethnic subject. She performs a daring deconstruction of the recurrence to ideas of authenticity and identity, discusses the pitfalls of essentialized concepts of 'activism' and 'community,' and encourages us to put the case of Asian Americans towards a more general critique of racialized U.S. society. Her intervention challenges us to think differently, to 'imagine otherwise.'" Lisa Lowe, author of Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics

Product Description

Imagine Otherwise is an incisive critique of the field of Asian American studies. Recognizing that the rubric "Asian American" elides crucial differences, Kandice Chuh argues for reframing Asian American studies as a study defined not by its subjects and objects, but by its critique. Toward that end, she urges the foregrounding of the constructedness of "Asian American" formations and shows how this understanding of the field provides the basis for continuing to use the term "Asian American" in light of—and in spite of—contemporary critiques about its limitations.

Drawing on the insights of poststructuralist theory, postcolonial studies, and investigations of transnationalism, Imagine Otherwise conceives of Asian American literature and U.S. legal discourse as theoretical texts to be examined for the normative claims about race, gender, and sexuality that they put forth. Reading government and legal documents, novels including Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, John Okada's No-No Boy, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls, and Lois Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging, and the short stories "Immigration Blues" by Bienvenido Santos and "High-Heeled Shoes" by Hisaye Yamamoto, Chuh works through Filipino American and Korean American identity formation and Japanese American internment during World War II as she negotiates the complex and sometimes tense differences that constitute 'Asian America' and Asian American studies.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 232 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press (May 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822331403
• ISBN-13: 978-0822331407
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #734,589 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Imagine this!, March 11, 2009

By	Graduate Student (College Park, MD) - See all my reviews

Sick of the limitations of identity politics? I know I am. Kandice Chuh's work takes Asian American cultural studies to an entirely new level, thinking critically about issues of postcoloniality, queerness, and transnationality that rest outside of the simple center/margins debate of race and representation. Her prose is simultaneously eloquent and accessible as she pulls together very different discourses, from the historical to the legal to the literary, to make a compelling and theoretically rich critique of old paradigms; a must for ethnic studies, cultural studies, and literary scholars.