Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America (Stanford Studies in Comparative Race and Ethnicity)

Crossing distinct literatures, histories, and politics, Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America reveals the intertwined story of contemporary Asian Americans and Latinxs through a shared literary aesthetic. Their transfictional literature creates expansive imagined worlds in which distinct stories coexist, offering artistic shape to their linked political and economic struggles. Long Le-Khac explores the work of writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Díaz, and Aimee Phan. He shows how their fictions capture the uneven economic opportunities of the post–civil rights era, the Cold War as it exploded across Asia and Latin America, and the Asian and Latin American labor flows powering global capitalism today. Read together, Asian American and Latinx literatures convey astonishing diversity and untapped possibilities for coalition within the United States' fastest-growing immigrant and minority communities; to understand the changing shape of these communities we must see how they have formed in relation to each other. As the U.S. population approaches a minority-majority threshold, we urgently need methods that can look across the divisions and unequal positions of the racial system. Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America leads the way with a vision for the future built on panethnic and cross-racial solidarity. Crossing distinct literatures, histories, and politics, Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America reveals the intertwined story of contemporary Asian Americans and Latinxs through a shared literary aesthetic. Their transfictional literature creates expansive imagined worlds in which distinct stories coexist, offering artistic shape to their linked political and economic struggles. Long Le-Khac explores the work of writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Karen Tei Yamashita, Junot Diaz, and Aimee Phan. He shows how their fictions capture the uneven economic opportunities of the post-civil rights era, the Cold War as it exploded across Asia and Latin America, and the Asian and Latin American labor flows powering global capitalism today. Read together, Asian American and Latinx literatures convey astonishing diversity and untapped possibilities for coalition within the United States' fastest-growing immigrant and minority communities; to understand the changing shape of these communities we must see how they have formed in relation to each other. As the U.S. population approaches a minority-majority threshold, we urgently need methods that can look across the divisions and unequal positions of the racial system. Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America leads the way with a vision for the future built on panethnic and cross-racial solidarity. Cover CONTENTS Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION: A Transfictional Solidarity PART I: FORMS AND FORMATIONS 1 Decentering Bildungsroman Hermeneutics: Cisneros, Kingston, and Post–Civil Rights Mobility 2 Narrating Cold War Displacement: Junot Díaz and Aimee Phan Trace the Migrations of U.S. Empire 3 Unsettling Strata and Type: Divided Communities of Neoliberal Immigration in Karma and The People of Paper PART II: PANETHNIC FICTIONS 4 Forming Panethnicity: The Book of Unknown Americans and the Comparative Work of Latinidad 5 Imagining Unity: I Hotel and the Utopian Horizons of Asian America CONCLUSION: A Politics of Beyond Notes Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z "Giving Form to an Asian and Latinx America tells the story of the making of a shared Latinx and Asian America over the past fifty years. Historically this solidarity has been difficult to see because Asian and Latinx immigrants have often been described in opposing terms of desirability (model minority versus "illegal" immigrant). However, by looking at similarities in Latinx and Asian American literatures, Long Le-Khac reveals their entangled histories and the ways in which these groups have formed in relation to one another"-- Provided by publisher