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Form-Giving and the Remains of Identity in A Gesture Life

This essay examines how the Asian American novel anchors its epistemological project on figures of identity that authorize its historicist claims. I argue that Chang-rae Lee's novel A Gesture Life relies on the remains of identitarian thinking even as it dismantles the coherence of identity categories. These assumptions become legible as Lee displaces the realist framework of the novel by depicting multiple temporalities and relying on racialized and gendered figures that exceed the time of history. I end by considering how A Gesture Life reveals the theoretical and political conundrums of Asian American literary culture after the critique of essentialism.