Cultural nationalism and Asian American literary formation (Frank Chin)

This dissertation addresses the rise of cultural nationalism in Asian American literature during the early 1970s and traces its continuing impact to the present. More specifically, I focus on the nationalist influences in the writings of Frank Chin as well as the Combined Asian American Resources Project (C.A.R.P.) which explicitly attempt to envision a distinctive Asian American literary and cultural sensibility. I examine how the seminal anthologies Aiiieeeee!, The Big Aiiieeeee!, and Chin's own work formulate and deploy notions of “the community” in the retroactive recovery of what Chin terms a “heroic” literary tradition based upon the codes of bravery and martial valor exemplified in both the culture of early Chinese American immigrants as well as classic Asian folk tales and literary texts. I am especially interested in analyzing particular tropes such as the figure of the nineteenth-century Chinese American railroad worker, the pop cultural “icon” Charlie Chan, and Chinatown as they recurrently appear in Chin's writing and suggest the contours of his political and aesthetic project. Moreover, I attempt to situate his work with respect to a broader narrative in which the trajectory of Asian American (cultural) politics in general can be periodized and discerned, In many ways representative of Asian American cultural nationalism, Chin's writing provides a focal point for the dissertation to engage subsequent critiques of this perspective as they pertain to larger issues of national identity, the politics of literary authenticity, and the relationship between diasporic writing and domestic minority discourse.