“Come almost home”: Deconstructing the Asian American Model Minority Myth in Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life
Asian American representation in the COVID-19 era “In being represented as citizen within the political sphere, the subject is ‘split off’ from the unrepresentable histories of situated embodiment that contradict the abstract form of citizenship. Culture is the medium of the present . . . but is simultaneously the site that mediates the past, through which history is grasped as difference, fragments and flashes of disjunction. It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as ‘American’”. –Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts 2 In the process of creating a culture of Asian American literary history, the Asian American subject must define its place within the national literary history of America. The creation of this literary culture is the assertion of the Asian American voice in mainstream American media—a task that is especially relevant amidst the present wave of racial equity movements spurred by the tragedies of the COVID-19 […]