| Once "Asian American" was established as a sociopolitical identity in the 1960s, Asian Americans began creating a unifying culture that would supplement and ultimately prove the underlying validity of such a group formation. Shifting the identity from the university to newsstands and bookstores, "panethnic entrepreneurs" attempted to produce a coherent Asian American culture that acknowledged diversity while remaining whole. This dissertation examines one prevalent strategy of coherence: a cleaved panethnicity in which each part contributes equally, together. By carefully assembling multiple perspectives, the editors of the panethnic textual coalitions I consider---the academic journal, the anthology, and the magazine---manage their constituents through literary form. How the editors then generate a larger meaning fusing these perspectives demonstrates the orchestration of community and, subsequently, the cultural possibilities of literary production.;Through wholeness and commemoration in Amerasia, the first and longest-running academic journal devoted to Asian American Studies, "cool" in Charlie Chan Is Dead 1 & 2, the first commercially published anthology of Asian American literature, and supplementation in A. Magazine: Inside Asian America, the first mass-market popular Asian American magazine, unity for Asian American cultural experiences takes shape. I argue that these unities enact a major shift in Asian American sociability, moving from a coalition-based model that was effective politically to a networking model of affiliation that creates cultural opportunities at every connection. These texts, in turning to an increasingly commercial culture and sociability to supplement the political, often provoked accusations of "selling out" the hard-won idea of Asian America. Instead, I reframe the logic of these texts as "buying in" and asserting consumer equality. In materially and historically fixing the moment in which Asian America went commercial, we see at work the print alchemy by which exclusion becomes exclusivity. |
