For her first book, Colleen Lye undertook an ambitiously interdisciplinary examination of the historical construction of Asian American identity. The Berkeley English professor"critical intervention" uses methods borrowed from literary studies, history, sociology, and law to scrutinize the representations of Asians that began to surface in American literature, the media, and legal statutes starting in the late 19th century, as the United States pursued a policy of expansion throughout the Pacific Rim and immigration to the West Coast from Asia was on the rise. She tracks the rise of a complex stereotype, through which Asian Americans come to be seen as both a "model minority" and a "yellow peril" a precociously assimilated minority for other minorities to emulate and, at the same time, a threat to American dominance as a modern industrial power. A quick look at coverage in the American media of China's emergence as a global economic power shows that not much has changed in 100 years.
Lye's study, America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945, documents the creation of Asian American identity by non-Asians. Now, in her latest project, Lye has turned her attention to Asian American self-representation with a question that once again interrogates the meaning of Asian American identity: Is there such a thing as Asian American fiction?
On the surface, the answers seems a self-evident "yes." Every Tuesday Lye teaches an undergraduate class called "The Asian American Novel." Yet, she says, the complex issues embedded in the history of the Asian American experience over the past century load even something as apparently simple as the name of her class with baggage that demands to be unpacked.
Colleen Lye
"We have become much more sophisticated about the constructedness of Asian American identity," Lye says, sitting in her small top-floor office in Wheeler Hall. "We can't take that identity for granted in any kind of essentialist way."
In 1982, scholar Elaine Kim published Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. It was the first academic book to introduce the Asian American literature as a field and, Lye says, "the last book to do it on a historical basis." Since then, she says, most critics in the field of Asian American literary studies have devoted their work to deconstructing any comfortable notions of what "Asian American" means.
America's Asia by Colleen Lye
Princeton University Press
Civil rights activists of the 1960s, though of many different backgrounds, embraced a pan-ethnic "Asian American" identity as an empowering form of self-recognition. By the 1980s, in the heyday of the identity politics era, that big tent had given way to what in her first book Lye calls a "limitless tendency toward fragmentation." The concept of "Asian American" began to be seen by some as a kind of cultural flattening that ignored Asia's vast ethnic complexity. That "self-reflexity," Lye says, has "disabled" most attempts to write Asian American literary history.
Not that Lye, who earned her B.A. from Berkeley in 1988, sees her new work as an effort to undermine those earlier critiques. Rather she believes the value lies in asking whether such a history can be written at all. Hopefully, she says, she won't find the answer anytime soon. "I would like the jury to be out as long as possible."
Lye does feel certain that what makes a work of literature Asian American is not a simple matter of aesthetics. "The basis for a commonality will not be as a result of finding some kind of ahistorical poetic unity," she says. Rather, the unifying factor, if one exists, will have to take in the self-conscious forging of, and response to, a historically grounded, evolving category of experience tied to the geography, culture, and political economy of the Pacific Rim.
– Marcus Wohlsen