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The State and Subject of Asian American Criticism: Psychoanalysis, Transnational Discourse, and Democratic Ideals

Much of Asian American criticism, be it literary or cultural, has been preoccupied with the definitional scope and struggle of what is "Asian," what is "American," and what is "Asian American." The question "to be" is not so much a question of essence underlying the category per se as it is a question of the social relations and circumstances through which an identity can stake and secure its very claims. Although the historical presence of Asian America as a communal geopolitical space and Asian Americans as a people can be traced to the founding of the US, their explicit categorical emergence is quite recent in origin. This gap between a material actuality and its discursive absence betrays the contradiction between the universal and the particular in the formation of an American national culture. To put it simply, an American universal of abstract citizenship is historically embodied in the particulars of a European morphology, whether it is in the form of the national image, its proper genealogy, or institutional and cultural legitimacy. The dominant particular is presented as an inclusive universal but translated historically and materially as a practice of excluding other particulars. In this historical imaginary of the American democratic vista, the Asian American is that which exists without a proper name and an appropriate contour.