Modern Minority

Asian American Literature and Everyday Life

Yoon Sun Lee

Reframes contemporary minority literature in terms of estrangement, the uncanny, and thingliness
Presents a fresh examination of canonical and emergent Asian American literature
Draws on Lukacs, Jameson, de Certeau, and other cultural critics to show how portraits of the everyday articulate Asian American writers' participation in the project of literary realism

Modern Minority

Asian American Literature and Everyday Life

Yoon Sun Lee

Description

Since the late nineteenth century, the concept of everyday life has been the subject of increasing scrutiny. The familiar events, routine actions, and ordinary objects that comprise modernity's daily life have been studied by Georg Simmel, Sigmund Freud, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and others. Informed by this theoretical tradition, Modern Minority argues that Asian American literary realism is defined by a focus on the everyday, which allows Asian Americans to comprehend their minority status and negotiate their historically vexed place in modern American culture.

Yoon Sun Lee's study offers new ways to think about an expansive range of literature. Issues of scale, size, and frequency emerge as the key to reading for the everyday. Questions of animation and of surface also become crucial to thinking about everyday forms. In its first section, novels by Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan precede letters and diaries depicting the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Despite their differences, these texts rely on repetition and focus on ordinary objects to overcome as well as to express feelings of meaningless and stagnation wrought by industrialization, racism, and war. Modern Minority's subsequent section features memoirs by Jade Snow Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston, along with fiction by Joy Kogawa, Nora Okja Keller, Ha Jin, Lan Samantha Chang, and others. These works expose the everyday's shifting role in relation to concepts such as ethnic history, self-knowledge, and thingness. The final section traces the everyday as it underpins notions of political modernity and at times undermines a sense of Asian American identity in writing by Chang-rae Lee, Frank Chin, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

Marked by attentive close readings and creative juxtapositions, Modern Minority situates Asian American writing not only in relation to ethnicity or nationhood, but within the context of a modern sense of time.

Modern Minority

Asian American Literature and Everyday Life

Yoon Sun Lee

Table of Contents

Introduction
Asian American Realism and the Forms of Everyday Minorness 1

Part I: Discovering the Modern Everyday

Chapter One
The Outward Spiral: Kang and Bulosan Ignore the Everyday 52

Chapter Two
Little Things: The Uncanny Everyday
of Internment Literature 102

Part II: The Problem of Identity

Chapter Three
Unlikely Daughters, Exemplary Mothers, and Disembedded Chinamen:
Jade Snow Wong and Maxine Hong Kingston 155

Chapter Four
The Changing Story of Thingness: From Kogawa and Keller to Ha Jin
and Lan Samantha Chang 201

Part III: Everyday Immanence

Chapter Five
Lists, Native Speaker, and the Politics of Emergence 245

Chapter Six
Extensive Time and Crumpled Surfaces: Projects of Identity
in Frank Chin and Lois-Ann Yamanaka 278

Conclusion
Encountering Modernity Every Day 316

Modern Minority

Asian American Literature and Everyday Life

Yoon Sun Lee

Author Information

Yoon Sun Lee is Professor of English at Wellesley College. She is the author of Nationalism and Irony: Burke, Scott, Carlyle.

Modern Minority

Asian American Literature and Everyday Life

Yoon Sun Lee

Reviews and Awards

"Yoon Lee has produced an ambitious and brilliant conceptualization of Asian American literature. This book models a breakthrough, expansive set of arguments for what ethnic literature can do, what it sees, and what it secretly longs for. Modern Minority is the work of Asian American literary criticism and theory we have been waiting for." --Colleen Lye, University of California, Berkeley

"In her new book, Yoon Lee takes us on a dizzying tour of Asian American texts as she explores the concept of everyday life. Deftly interpolating literature, oral history, and cultural artifacts, the author draws our attention to the power of the ordinary in interpreting modernity." --Greg Robinson, Université du Québec à Montréal

"Yoon Lee's compelling book, Modern Minority, reminds us that modernity's traces reside in 'little things' and 'not much happening': lists, objects, routines, the mundane. Her ability to tease meaning out of Asian American literature's engagement with the banalities of everyday life stands as a testament to the work's telescopic power." --Leslie Bow, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Theoretically sophisticated and critically astute, Yoon Lee focuses our attention on the narrative techniques and devices whereby Asian American texts register the everyday routines of modernity. In doing so, she opens up exciting new vistas for literary and cultural analysis, and places back on the agenda of cultural theory the question of Asian American realism's critical relation to capitalism." --Mark Chiang, University of Illinois at Chicago