http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3920-7191
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ABSTRACT
This paper identifies in Atlantic studies three fundamental “oceanic” motions and their attendant conditions of possibility that seem useful for further developing the notion of the transpacific as both a feature of and a theater for the rise of global modernity: circulation/commerce; displacement/diaspora; and expansion/empire. To demonstrate their utility, this paper shows how these dyads help bring into focus the deep transpacific currents informing the narrative substance and logic of Carlos Bulosan’s renowned autobiographical narrative, America is in the Heart. In doing so, it puts forth the notion of the “ethnic picaresque” as a way to further develop a transpacific theorization of literary and cultural production by people of Asian descent in the United States and elsewhere that moves expressly beyond the conceptual boundaries of the nation.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to express his thanks to guest editors Jens Temmen and Nicole Poppenhagen, both for their initial instigation and valuable advice along the way.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Steven Yao is Edmund A. LeFevre Professor of Literature at Hamilton College. He is the author of Translation and the Languages of Modernism and Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity. He is also co-editor of three volumes of essays: Sinographies, Pacific Rim Modernisms, and Ezra Pound and Education. He has earned fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Council on Education.
ORCID
Steven Yao http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3920-7191
Notes
1 I employ the term “global modernity” broadly here to refer to the general, evolving set of material (i.e., technological and economic) infrastructures and conceptual regimes, in the ascendant since at least the seventeenth century in the West, that have led to humans interacting with one another and their environment in increasingly numerous and complex ways across the physical expanse of the entire planet.
2 Hoskins and Nguyen, Framing, 10.
3 See, for example, Lowe “Transpacific Migrant,” 71. There, she notes,
Transpacific Asian migration disrupts disciplinary practices for the study of “Asia,” “America,” and even the “Asian American” that emerged in US universities since the 1970s. To the extent that this new object exceeds the contours of the earlier paradigms, it may force a shift in the methods and objects of Asian studies, American studies and Asian American studies.
4 I have been humbled and happy to learn that, in using this phrase, I follow in the wake and echo the work of scholars such as James Clifford (Routes) and DeLoughrey (Routes and Roots), whose comparative study of Caribbean and Pacific Island literatures goes by the same title. Though unknown to me at the time of initial writing, DeLoughrey's notion of a “tidalectic” between land and sea as a way to theorize the dynamics of pelagic writing clearly anticipates and resonates with my focus here on three different forms of “oceanic” motion and their conditions of possibility. The primary difference between our usages, then, lies in scope. Where she deploys the phrase in her study to mark an encounter between indigenous and diaspora literary studies in her exploration of two specific literary formations, my usage stresses the importance of transpacific flows of people, goods, and ideas in the rise of modernity as a truly global phenomenon. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for bringing this happy coincidence to my attention.
5 In this regard, a transpacific approach resonates with and builds upon scholarship in transnational Asian American studies which theorizes the empire- and nation-building processes that bind the Pacific world to the US. Important contributions here include work by Cynthia Enloe, or Pamela Thoma on the comfort woman debate, or Shirley Lim et al.'s edited collection on transnational Asian American literatures.
6 I refer here, of course, to Lisa Lowe's renowned article “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity” and its influence on the field of Asian American literary studies.
7 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 15.
8 Edwards, Diaspora, 13.
9 Rowe, “New American Studies,” 26.
10 Doyle, Freedom's Empire, 15. More recently, Doyle has gone so far as to suggest that, ‘we might pay more attention to the contemporaneity of empires and the accumulation of vexed cultural exchange among empires, over generations’ (“Afterword,” 672).
11 Sakai and Yoo, Transpacific Studies, 6, 31.
12 Rowe, “Transpacific Studies and US Imperialism,” 136.
13 Bulosan, America, v. All subsequent references to this work cited by page number in the body of the text.
14 As an example of this sort of reading, see San Juan Jr.'s classic study, Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle.
15 See, for example, Kandice Chuh's treatment of Bulosan's autobiographical narrative as a “novel” in Imagine Otherwise, 31–41.
16 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 45–46. Subsequent references cited by page number in the body of the text.
17 Lowe's critique in Immigrant Acts (and elsewhere) of the cultural nationalist roots in Asian American studies makes her understanding of the link between the bildungsroman form and the category of the nation. For a slightly different take on the bildungsroman genre and its relation to Asian American literature, see Stella Bolaki's Unsettling the Bildungsroman as well as Najmi Samina's article “Decolonizing the Bildungsroman.” For a very different take on the issue on fictional form, narrative perspective, and literature by people of Asian descent in the United States, see Stephen Hong Sohn's Racial Asymmetries.
18 For additional discussion of some of the contradictory logic and policies surrounding the annexation of the Philippines and the management of Filipinos as “American nationals,” but crucially ineligible for citizenship, see Ngai's Impossible Subjects.
19 These white women figures hint at the anxiety over miscegenation that made up an important feature of Filipino racialization in both the US and the Philippines. For additional discussion of America miscegenation laws and their relation to Filipinos in particular, see Susan Koshy's Sexual Naturalization.
20 For an earlier and somewhat different use of “ethnic picaresque,” see Alexandra Ganser's Roads of Her Own, where she deploys the term in relation to the tradition of American road narratives rather than to literary production by people of Asian descent. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for bringing this reference to my attention.