This essay takes account of the formalist desires of recent Asian American literary criticism. It argues that a focus on form may discover firmer ground for the future of Asian American studies, but only if that focus remains cognizant of the interdisciplinary origins of Asian American studies.
J oe Cleary's foreword to this issue in part tells the story of how the Cold War skewed the aesthetic valuation of twentieth-century nonEuro-American literatures: it masked their diversity by partitioning a liberal modernism from a socialist realism and thus inclining postcolonial critics based in metropolitan institutions toward modernist criteria. Yet political nonalignment for the Third World writer in fact entailed an agnostic stance, with both modernist and realist forms usable for anticolonial expression. In revisiting the question of peripheral realism, this special issue thus reasserts the aesthetic range of nonEuro-American literary practice beyond that of conformity to an international modernist style and its offshoots (fabulism, oral literature, metahistorical allegory, magical realism). It seeks to restore to view the agency of the Third World writer freed from the role of repeating forms pioneered elsewhere in earlier times. Indeed, if our present situation allows for reconsidering the lively fate of realism in the peripheries of the twentieth-century literary world-system -and with it the possible transcendence of the realism/modernism antinomy -then we are also once again forced to reckon with the obsolescence of the concept of the Third World today. Such a reckoning may broaden our historical perspective on what was Third World literature, but it also requires an appropriate caution about any replacement concept, including the notion of peripheral literature that organizes this special issue.
If the spate of recent publications on transnational Afro-Asian connections is any indication, we may have finally arrived at a welcome third stage of ethnic studies, one long postponed by a standoff between a multiracial model limited by a national horizon and a diasporic model that lacked a historical ground for conducting cross-racial analysis. The neo-Bandung allegiance of this Afro-Asianism—most prominent in the work of Vijay Prashad and Bill Mullen—explicitly aligns itself against the postnationalist ethos of hybridity theory and in favor of a toughened anti-imperial stance. There is much to admire about this critical turn; its increasing influence is surely a sign of our worsening times, reflected in the difference between the postsocialist euphoria of the 1990s—which projected the radicalization of democracy through the articulation of class with race, gender, and sexuality—and the return of empire and its banalization of democratic rhetoric after 9/11. Despite this Afro-Asianist project's more open recognition of the relevance of Asian embourgeoisement to its own desire for a renewed resistance politics, however, it is not yet clear whether the retrieval of Third Worldist genealogies accomplishes something more than a nostalgic response to the rise of Asian capitalism on a world scale and to the thinning claim of Asian American intellectuals to any representative function. And yet, to fulfill the originary promise of ethnic studies, which emerged out of the articulation between anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggle in the late 1960s, this is what it must and should do.
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