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REPRESENTATIONS

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Foreword by Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner................................................................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments.........................................................................................................................................................................................................xivIntroduction: Performing Asian American Rhetoric into the American Imaginary............................................................................................................................................11 Transnational Asian American Rhetoric as a Diasporic Practice Rory Ong..............................................................................................................................................252 Reexamining the Between-Worlds Trope in Cross-Cultural Composition Studies Tomo Hattori and Stuart Ching............................................................................................................413 Asian American Rhetorical Memory and a "Memory That Is Only Sometimes Our Own" Haivan V. Hoang......................................................................................................................624 Listening for Legacies; or, How I Began to Hear Dorothy Laigo Cordova, the Pinay behind the Podium Known as FANHS Terese Guinsatao Monberg..........................................................................835 Learning Authenticity: Pedagogies of Hindu Nationalism in North America Subhasree Chakravarty.......................................................................................................................1066 Relocating Authority: Coauthor(iz)ing a Japanese American Ethos of Resistance under Mass Incarceration Mira Chieko Shimabukuro......................................................................................1277 Rhetoric of the Asian American Self: Influences of Region and Social Class on Autobiographical Writing Robyn Tasaka.................................................................................................1538 "Artful Bigotry and Kitsch": A Study of Stereotype, Mimicry, and Satire in Asian American T-Shirt Rhetoric Vincent N. Pham and Kent A. Ono..........................................................................1759 Beyond "Asian American" and Back: Coalitional Rhetoric in Print and New Media Jolivette Mecenas.....................................................................................................................19810 On the Road with P. T. Barnum's Traveling Chinese Museum: Rhetorics of Public Reception and Self-Resistance in the Emergence of Literature by Chinese American Women Mary Louise Buley-Meissner.....................21811 Rereading Sui Sin Far: A Rhetoric of Defiance Bo Wang...............................................................................................................................................................24412 Margaret Cho, Jake Shimabukuro, and Rhetorics in a Minor Key Jeffrey Carroll........................................................................................................................................26613 "Maybe I Could Play a Hooker in Something!" Asian American Identity, Gender, and Comedy in the Rhetoric of Margaret Cho Michaela D. E. Meyer........................................................................27914 Learning Asian American Affect K. Hyoejin Yoon......................................................................................................................................................................293Afterword: Toward a Theory of Asian American Rhetoric: What Is to Be Done?..............................................................................................................................................323Index...................................................................................................................................................................................................................333Contributors............................................................................................................................................................................................................338

Chapter One

Rory Ong

Too often, the dilemma for resident Asians in the United States, Pacific Islanders, and multigenerational Asian Americans centers on explaining away their disparate (dis)placements or (dis)positions in the national American narrative. Transnationalism has fast become one rhetorical commonplace that attempts to resolve these discontinuities that have been historically engendered by geopolitical and economic border crossings, the impact of global trade, and a growing global economy. Some of the earliest discussions around transnationalism and Asia Pacific focused on the economic reforms occurring in newly industrialized countries like China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand (Cummings 1998). The emphasis was on the consistency and like-mindedness of so-called miracle Asian economies and their citizen workforce, which adopted western values of trade, commerce, and consumption. However, alternative scholarship on the Asian diaspora (Chow 1993; Dirlik 1998; HuDehart 1999; Ang 2001; Grewal 2005) has begun to articulate a transnationalism that takes stock of disparate and uneven Asian transcontinental and transoceanic crossings in order to illumine the contradictions and inconsistencies in im/migrant Asian lives and identities.

One of the difficulties in articulating a rhetoric particular to the Asian diaspora in the United States has to do with its multivalency and the long history of an Asian habitus in the West. An Asian habitus is produced from overlapping and embedded quotidian relations involving the sociohistorical, political, and economic structures that thread the material interlacing of daily life and human agency. This also accounts for the complicity of Asian diasporic subjects, whose various articulations of material life are sutured to quotidian systems and structures of classification such as language, immigration legislation, and economic policies as well as to racial formations, sociopolitical arrangements, and distributions of power. An Asian habitus, therefore, involves the everyday practices, discourses, and cultural lore invented in conjunction with the material conditions of multigenerational and transnational Asian Americans whose lives, as Lisa Lowe points out, are "juridically legislated, territorially situated, and culturally embodied" (1996, 2). Lowe particularly refers to the ways in which the architecture of U.S. citizenship, the systemic exclusion and alienation of Asians in the United States, and the militarization and colonization of the Pacific have contributed to the national imagination of Asia, and Asians, in an American empire (4-5). Such a habitus is replete with diasporic identities and cultural practices that are in tense and uneven relation to a western hegemony that is delineated around U.S. conceptualizations of national affiliation, territory, and economic and military dominance across Asia and the Pacific. An Asian habitus accordingly produces a hybridized and heterogeneous transnational...