“Asian Pride Porn”: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Narrative of Asian Racial Uplift in Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy

Ding, Yuan

doi:10.1093/melus/mlaa028

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

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International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity

Noorda,

Weber,

Bold

2024

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International bestsellers are the ideal sites for examining the complicated relationship between literary culture and national identity. Despite the transnational turns in both literary studies and book history, place is still an important configurer of twenty-first-century book reception. Books are crucial to national identity and catalysts of nationalist movements. On an individual level, books enable readers to shape and maintain their own national identities. This Element explores how contemporary readers' understandings of nation, race/ethnicity, gender, and class continue to shape their reading, using as case studies the online reception of three bestseller titles-Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies (Australia), Zadie Smith's NW (UK), and Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians (USA). In doing so, this Element demonstrates the need for and articulates a transnational conceptualisation of the relationship between reader identity and reception.

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International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity

Noorda,

Weber,

Bold

2024

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China, Malaysia, and millennial diasporic identity in Tash Aw’s The Face and Five Star Billionaire

Lim

2021

Journal of Postcolonial Writing

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Asia Rising Is an Imperial Fiction: A View from the Indian Ocean

Qadir

2022

Comparative Literature

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Popular rhetoric of the twenty-first century as the “Asian century” frequently coheres around China as a rising global superpower and thus focuses on its financial and material ambitions in sites across Asia and Africa. Such narratives, ensconced within the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) formation, re-entrench a problematic Orientalism while pushing further to the margins still the complex, long-standing regional histories. This essay juxtaposes Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy and Kevin Kwan’s Rich trilogy in relation to Indian Ocean histories of trade and exchange. Through world-historical events activated in these novels such as World War II and the first Anglo-Opium War, the essay’s argument follows nineteenth- and twentieth-century transits between the South Asian subcontinent, the Malay Archipelago, and China. Taking circularity as a central analytic, this essay reveals how an elongated temporal frame that accounts from non-European vantages—even in contemporary Anglophone literature—reorients not only what we consider the past and present of Indian Ocean worlds, but also how those pasts bear on the contemporary.

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“Asian Pride Porn”: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Narrative of Asian Racial Uplift in Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity

International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity

China, Malaysia, and millennial diasporic identity in Tash Aw’s The Face and Five Star Billionaire

Asia Rising Is an Imperial Fiction: A View from the Indian Ocean

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