Abstract
When Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker was published in 1995, it made a proverbial splash in the world of Asian American literature. Among the multitudinous expressions of praise bestowed and scholarship produced on the novel, the imaginative combination of the immigrant novel with the spy thriller is singled out as one of the novel’s most distinctive qualities. Yet it was marketed as an immigrant novel. That Native Speaker is marketed primarily as such should not be surprising; after all, almost all literary productions by Asian Americans, fiction and nonfiction alike, are presumed to carry an immigrant theme until proven otherwise. The infusion of the spy thriller genre into immigrant fiction, however, gave the latter a fresh angle and a new set of tropes with which to tell a familiar story.
Genres make possible a legible scene of transformation.
—Bruce Robbins
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Notes
John Frow, Genre (London: Routledge, 2006): 2.
Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn 1980): 57.
Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999): 8.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002): 7.
Zhou Xiaojing, “Introduction,” Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, ed. Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005): 4.
Sue-Im Lee, “Introduction,” Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, ed. Rocio G. Davis and Sue-Im Lee (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006): 6.
John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989): ix.
See The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, ed. Martin Priestman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendle-sohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
PMLA 119.3 (May 2004), a special issue titled “Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millenium,” edited by Marleen S. Barr and Carl Freedman
PMLA 122.4 (October 2007), a special issue on “Remapping Genre,” edited by Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins
MELUS 33.4 (Winter 2008), a special issue titled “Alien/Asian” on Asian American science fiction, edited by Stephen Hong Sohn.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990): 147.
Robert Scholes, “The Roots of Science Fiction,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976): 47–48.
Darko Suvin, “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Rose (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976): 57–71.
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© 2010 Betsy Huang
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Huang, B. (2010). Introduction: “Generic” Asian Americans?. In: Contesting Genres in Contemporary Asian American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117327_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117327_1
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