Asian American Studies is undergoing a crisis of identity, split between its “nativist” and activist origins in the civil rights movements of the 1960s, and the contemporary “global” realities of the field and of its subject matter. One critic has summarized the problem as that of the “constitutive ambivalence in the relations between Asian and Asian American Studies,” and such matters manifest themselves on the disciplinary level as well as in the practice and study of Asian American literature. In this essay, I address these issues first by providing a brief history of the origins and development of Asian American Studies, tracing its development from activist and community-based movements to its gradual relocation within discourses of diaspora and transnationalism. Then, I consider how these issues can be seen at play within specific literary works, focusing on two memoirs. The Asian American memoir about the homeland, in tracing the movement from country of origin to the attainment of an “American dream,” already instantiates the presence of diaspora and post-colonialism within Asian American literature. I consider Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces and Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother as instances not just of “Asian American” narratives but also of post-colonial or colonial ones. Finally, I conclude by questioning these authors' apparent needs, shared by many Asian American writers, to reinscribe their narrative within the expected trope of the attainment of an “American dream.”
KISS
