Modern Language Association 2011, Los Angeles, California
Thursday, January 6
102. Literature, Wars, and the American Body
3:30-4:45 p.m., Platinum Salon A, J. W. Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on Asian American Literature and the American Literature Section
Presiding: Paul Y. Lai, Univ. of Saint Thomas
1. "The Body under Siege: The Affective Legacy of War in Chang-Rae Lee's The Surrendered," Susan Muchshima Moynihan, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York
2. "The Premilitarized Black Body, the Korean War, and Afro-Orientalism in Clarence Adams's An American Dream," Daniel Young-Hoon Kim, Brown Univ.
3. "Photographing Ghosts, Memorializing the Body: le thi diem thuy and the Traumatic Representation of Viet Nam," Adrian Khactu, Univ. of Pennsylvania
Respondent: Jodi S. Kim, Univ. of California, Riverside
. . . . . .
The Asian American Literature Division and American Literature Section have selected for a collaborative session three presentations that focus on how American military involvement in other countries has generated significant changes to the American national body, historical narrative, and subject-citizen. This panel foregrounds texts about American engagements in the Asia-Pacific theater in the Cold War. This geopolitical location and the relations between the United States and countries in Asia have been central to the formation and consolidation of the American nation in an imperial and neocolonial era.
Reading literature that represents the trauma of war experience, the papers on this panel explore material bodies--human, textual, and other--that help ground or destabilize a sense of American national identity. Importantly, this panel pushes against understandings of these war-torn bodies and histories as foreign, insisting instead on how they are integral to conceptions of American subjecthood in all its complexly-differentiated racial and gendered forms. The bodies of African American soldiers, of Asian enemy soldiers, or of Asian refugees settling in the United States all frustrate conceptions of the normative, white male American subject. Additionally, the presentations engage with critical questions about the articulation of bodies to emotions, race, or memory.
Susan Muchshima Moynihan in "The Body Under Siege: The Affective Legacy of War in Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered" analyzes how feelings that circulate as a result of the Korean War work to secure and at times to relinquish politically inscribed boundaries of Self and Other. Focusing on Lee's new book The Surrendered (2010), Moynihan considers the emotional impact of the war as it affectively constructs the refugee and American national body, allowing the forgotten history of the war to surface in ways that continue to implicate the United States in this historical moment of a Korean civil war. In this presentation, Moynihan draws on Sara Ahmed's book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in its move away from popular models of emotions. Ahmed argues "that emotions create the very effect of the surfaces and boundaries that allow us to distinguish an inside and an outside in the first place" (10), and such an "intensification" of what we perceive as stable borders, boundaries, and surfaces are generated effects, indeed often uneven effects, secured by relations of power (24-25). This emphasis on contingency applies even to the perception of the incontrovertible nature of the body. The emphasis here is on the political effect of the movement or circulation of emotion, and the resulting emphasis on orientation or what she calls "towardness." The meanings of these moments of contact are shaped by historical relations that may or may not be consciously acknowledged. This approach has implications not only for our understanding of the relations between individuals, but also for the feelings that secure notions of collective bodies, including the nation.
In "The Premilitarized Black Body, the Korean War and Afro-Orientalism in Clarence Adams's An American Dream," Daniel Y. Kim considers the refusal of 21 American GIs to return to the United States after the cessation of hostilities in the Korean War. Labeled "turncoats" and "traitors" by US journalists and politicians, the actions of these soldiers and their statements to the press appeared to confirm two allegations made by Soviet, North Korean and Chinese propaganda: 1) that the United States had been acting as an imperialist aggressor; and 2) that America's descriptions of itself as a bastion of equality and freedom were ludicrous considering the virulent racism to which its black and Asian American citizens had been subjected throughout its history. Kim focuses on a memoir written by one of these black GIs, Clarence Adams, reading his autobiography--An American Dream: The Life of an African American Soldier and POW Who Spent Twelve Years in Communist China (2007)--for the continuities and discontinuities that link three central locations: the segregated Memphis of the 1930s and 40s; the battlefields of Korea; and the prison camp in which Adams spent much of the war. Kim traces how Adams's narrative follows a kind of non-aligned path between communist and liberal American Cold War ideologies, borrowing elements of each though what underlies it is a conception of race war that resembles the discourse described by Michel Foucault in "Society Must Be Defended." Adams's writing asserts that the psyches of the black men who fought in Korea were turned into subjects and objects of racial violence long before they entered the militaryÑthat their bodies were essentially premilitarized. Adams's narrative renders the complex sense of interracial and intraracial violence that structures Afro-Asian formations of conflict and solidarity through its various renderings of black and yellow male bodies engaged in racial warfare.
Finally, Adrian Khactu in "Photographing Ghosts, Memorializing the Body: le thi diem thuy and the Traumatic Representation of Viet Nam" considers le's semi-autobiographical narrative The Gangster We Are All Looking For (2003) for its frustration of the traditional memoir form and the standard of historical truth. The narrative of an unnamed, newly-arrived Vietnamese girl's transformation into a Vietnamese American, while carefully fabricated, depends on the perceived biographical reflection of the author's life and speaks its truth in maddening ways. Photographic objects become the narrator's Proustian madeleines, and as such, these often-discarded, found photographs form the structure of the book, introducing each new chapter and almost defying the reader to doubt the narrative's pieces of "real," physical evidence. le's use of photography in the narrative demonstrates her narrator's growing awareness of being cast as an object of history and of what she must do to create her own subjectivity from what others have already constructed. Also, in defamiliarizing a received American historical narrative through the same visual media that helped create it, the photographs allow le's narrator the access needed to claim her own memory as official American history. Using a visual culture critique, Khactu investigates how le's own body becomes a metonym for America, allowing the ghosts of those gangsters, those boat people who did not survive, to be equally represented and seen.
. . . . . .
Susan Muchshima Moynihan is Assistant Professor of English at the State University New York at Buffalo where she has also served as director of the Master's Program. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University. Her current book project, Affect, History, and the Subject of Asian American Literature, takes up affect theory to explore historical trauma, bodies, and emotions in Asian American literature. She has presented portions of her research at the American Studies Association, Northeast Modern Language Association, Association for Asian American Studies, and the Modern Language Association. She research focuses on texts such as Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother, le thi diem thuy's The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Aimee Phan's We Shall Never Meet, Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala, Meena Alexander's Fault Lines, and Abraham Verghese's My Own Country. She has taught a range of courses such as "Affect and Autobiography: Asian American Life Writing," "Trauma, History, and the Body in Asian American Literature," and "Asian American Sexualities."
Daniel Y. Kim is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. His book, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford, 2005), brings together Asian American and African American literary studies in an exploration of masculinity in narratives of racialized identity. His current book-in-progress, "The Dematerialized Zone: American Representations of the Korean War," examines American cultural representations of what has come to be known as "the forgotten war," with a primary aim of working against the seeming historical erasure of this event. The project returns to cultural texts from the 1950s, from novels to films and journalistic accounts, that enable us to understand how this conflict was depicted as it was occurring and to trace how it became forgotten--how it came to be dematerialized in the American historical imaginary. The study also reflects upon the psychic and political issues raised by works of a recent generation of Korean American authors (Susan Choi, Nora Okja Keller, and Chang-rae Lee) that attest to the lingering, if sometimes unarticulated, influence of the war. These authors' writings also occasion a reconsideration of the forms of subjectivity that might emerge through the remembrance of an injurious and significant, though largely forgotten past. He has also published a number of essays including "'Bled in Letter by Letter': Translation, Postmemory and the Subject of Korean War History in Susan Choi's The Foreign Student" in American Literary History (2009), "Once More With Feeling: Cold War Masculinity and the Sentiment of Patriotism in John Okada's No-No Boy" in Criticism (2005), "'Do I, Too, Sing America?' Vernacular Representations and Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker" in Journal of Asian American Studies (2003), "The Strange Love of Frank Chin" in Q&A: Queer in Asian America (1998), and "Invisible Desires: Homoerotic Racism and its Homophobic Critique in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man" in Novel (1997).
Adrian Khactu is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania where his research focuses on literature and film, comparative racial and ethnic studies, and queer theory. He received an M.A. in creative writing from Temple University and his B.A. in English and creative writing from Stanford University. He has taught courses such as "Introduction to Critical Literary Theory," "Hollywood, Race, & Sex: Topics in Film Practice," and "Race Matters: Writing Ethnic Studies." He has presented papers at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) and the American Studies Association (ASA). He has won numerous awards for his research, teaching, and creative writing.
Jodi Kim is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies. Her book Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War was published in 2010 as part of the University of Minneapolis Press's Critical American Studies Series. She has also published essays in a number of refereed journals, including "An 'Orphan' with Two Mothers: Transnational and Transracial Adoption, the Cold War, and Contemporary Asian American Cultural Politics" in American Quarterly (2009); "From Mee-gook to Gook: The Cold War and Racialized Undocumented Capital in Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker" in MELUS (2009); "'I'm Not Here, If This Doesn't Happen': The Korean War and Cold War Epistemologies in Susan Choi's The Foreign Student and Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother" in Journal of Asian American Studies (2008); and "Haunting History: Violence, Trauma, and the Politics of Memory in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman" in Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism (1999). She has developed courses such as "Asian American Literature: A Historical Survey"; "Asian American Film and Video"; "Theories of Race and Resistance"; and "Imperialism, Colonialism, Racism: Global Perspectives."
Paul Lai is an Instructor of Asian American Literature at the University of St. Thomas and a member of the Asian American Literature Division executive committee of the MLA. His primary research focuses on sounds in Asian American cultural production, from screams to accented English and popular music. He has also been working on a second project examining contact between Native and Asian bodies, histories, texts, and stories in North America. His publications include "Autoethnography Otherwise: Challenging Poetics and Re-Meaning Race in Fred Wah's Creative Nonfiction" in an anthology of critical essays titled Beyond Autoethnography in Asian Canadian Writing and "Stinky Bodies: Mythological Futures and the Olfactory Sense in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl" in MELUS. He has reviewed Asian American literature and criticism in journals such as MELUS, Modern Fiction Studies, and Asian American Literary Review. He is the co-editor of a special issue of Mfs on "Theorizing Asian American Fiction" (March 2010) and a special issue of American Quarterly on "Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism, and American Studies" (September 2010). He has taught a graduate course on "War and Colonialism in Asian American Literature" and other courses that focus on narratives of militarism, empire, and trauma.
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .
The other panels organized by the Division on Asian American Literature are:
Friday, 07 January
320. Asian American Cityscapes
1:45-3:00 p.m., Olympic 1, J. W. Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on Asian American Literature
Presiding: Tina Yih-Ting Chen, Penn State Univ., University Park
1. "Cityscapes: The Asian American Ghetto," Yoonmee Chang, George Mason Univ.
2. "Global South in the Global City: Magical Realist Mapping of Social Ecology in Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita," Xiaojing Zhou, Univ. of the Pacific
3. "'A New Mappa Mundi': Transnational Cityscapes in South Asian and American Art," Rajender Kaur, William Paterson Univ.
. . . . . . .
Saturday, 08 January
466. Teaching Asian American Literatures
10:15-11:30 a.m., Platinum Salon I, J. W. Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on Asian American Literature
Presiding: Kandice Chuh, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
1. "Teaching Asian American Graphic Narratives in a 'Post-Race' Era," Caroline Kyungah Hong, Queens Coll., City Univ. of New York
2. "Linking Words and Histories: Teaching South Asian and Arab American Literature after 9/11," Anantha Sudhakar, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick
3. "When Words Aren't Enough: Race, Reparations, and Interracial Justice," Lynn M. Itagaki, Ohio State Univ., Columbus
4. "Introducing the Field," Wen Jin, Columbia Univ.
. . . . . . .
Sunday, 09 January
681. Writing Human Rights: Asian American Contexts
8:30-9:45 a.m., Atrium 1, J. W. Marriott
Program arranged by the Division on Asian American Literature
Presiding: Anita Mannur, Miami Univ., Oxford
1. "Cold War Human Rights: Le Ly Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places," Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs
2. "Come Almost Home: Human Rights and the Minor Subjects of Asian American Literature," Crystal A. Parikh, New York Univ.
3. "Who's Helping Whom? Satirizing International Relief Efforts in Tony D'Souza's Whiteman," Stephen Sohn, Stanford Univ.
. . . . . . .
. . . . . . .