Although immigrants from Asia and Americans of Asian descent have been writing in the United States since the 19th century, Asian American literature as a category of writing only came into existence in the early 1970s. Perhaps the earliest references to "Asian American literature" appeared with David Hsin-fu Wand's Asian American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, published in 1974, and Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, edited by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, also published in 1974. Elaine Kim's seminal book of criticism, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, was published in 1982 and was the first critical book on the topic.
Since then, the field of Asian American literature and of Asian American literary criticism has grown remarkably. But defining "Asian American literature" remains a troublesome task. Most critics who have written about Asian American literature implicitly or explicitly define it as being written by Asian Americans, and usually about Asian Americans. This definition poses a number of problems that are an ongoing source of discussion for Asian American literary critics: who is an Asian American? Is "America" only the United States, or does it include the rest of the Americas? If an Asian American writes about characters who are not Asian American, is this Asian American literature? If someone who is not Asian American writes about Asian Americans, is this Asian American literature?
The challenges around defining Asian American literature are not unique to it and indicate difficulties not so much with the field of Asian American literature but with issues of race, culture, and national identity that are endemic to United States history and culture.
Some key Asian American authors include:
See also: List of Asian American writers- Carlos Bulosan
- Frank Chin
- Louis Chu
- Sui Sin Far (1865-1914)
- Gish Jen
- Maxine Hong Kingston
- Jhumpa Lahiri
- Toshio Mori (1910-1980)
- John Okada (1923-1971)
- Han Ong
- Bienvenido Santos
- Lisa See
- Amy Tan
- le thi diem thuy
- Adrian Tomine
- Hisaye Yamamoto (1921-2011)
- Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Famous quotes containing the words asian, american and/or literature:
“Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.”
—Han Suyin (b. 1917)
“There exists in a great part of the Northern people a gloomy diffidence in the moral character of the government. On the broaching of this question, as general expression of despondency, of disbelief that any good will accrue from a remonstrance on an act of fraud and robbery, appeared in those men to whom we naturally turn for aid and counsel. Will the American government steal? Will it lie? Will it kill?—We ask triumphantly.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.”
—Jonathan Miller (b. 1936)