I am scheduled to teach, for the first time, a class in Asian American Literature starting next month, and I am wondering if people here might have some thoughts on a question that I have been asking myself in terms of what should be on the reading list. I would like to include Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are the eerie parallels between the way the beginnings of the 1978-79 revolution are represented and the events that took place in Iran this past June and July after the contested presidential elections (and those parallels are even stronger in the movie). These parallels are important not so much because I want to teach something about Iran today, but because of the way they contextualize the protagonist’s conflicted sense of self after she has spent time outside of Iran, and she experiences herself as not being part of either Iranian culture or the culture to which she has traveled.
The thing is that Marjane Satrapi is not American, and so nothing about her book represents an Asian-American experience. At the same time, however, it would be foolish, I think, not to see her book as part of Asian-American literature. It exists in American English, is not, by virtue of its content, so easily and narrowly categorized as French literature in translation and it absolutely speaks to an experience that Iranian-Americans share and that others will recognize as part of the Iranian-American experience, even if some of the specifics are slightly different.
Normally, I do not worry so much about categorizing literature like this, but largely because this is the first time I am teaching this course and because I recognize that Asian American literature is an established field of academic study that I have a responsibility to represent accurately in my class, I am wondering about the degree to which assigning a book like Persepolis undermines the notion that a class like this should represent the Asian-American experience and present students with books written by Asian-Americans, even if the Asian-American experience is not, per se, what the book is about.
My own gut feeling as a writer is that the question I am asking sets up a false dichotomy, but I am not Asian-American, am not at all well-versed in the field of Asian American studies and so I don’t want to presume that my gut feeling is accurate–especially since, as I said, this is the first time I am teaching this class. So I am wondering what people here might think.
My feeling is that while students benefit from your enthusiasm for books that you love, you have to be careful not to become too attached if your choice does not seem to serve the overall aims of the syllabus.
I’ve not taught Asian-American lit but the graduate-level course I took in the material emphasized the production history of Asian-American lit: it was a chronological survey of relevant books but also a ongoing lesson in how much the material production of books is influenced by cultural expectations and how much cultural expectations in turn are influenced by which books get to be published and which don’t. (c.f. a number of “model minority” autobiographies in the 30s and 40s v. a number of sensuous, food-driven narratives like Eating Chinese Food Naked and The Book of Salt today). To me, that class seemed to be organized in a way that let us take each book on its own terms, yet think critically about what “Asian-American literature” even is.
Since I was so impressed with the course I’m offering it as an example – “What is Asian-American literature” might not even be one of your pressing questions, or if it is, one could certainly ask why Persepolis is so compelling to American audiences as a kind of supplementary question. I suppose it depends on what you would be leaving out to fit this book in.
I expect that your students would be pretty surprised to read Persepolis not because Satrapi isn’t American, but because they aren’t going to see Iranians as Asian. I did a few Asian American studies classes as an undergrad and we covered East and South Asia, but nothing as far west as Iran. When we talked about Said and orientalism, it was specifically through the lens that he was talking about one “orient” (the near east), while a lot of what he had to say applied to another “orient” (east asia). I’m sure you’ve already considered this, but a good historic graphic novel about the Asian American experience is Mine Okubo’s Citizen 13660, which is about Internment. Of course, there are a lot of Asian American comics artists writing about the contemporary Asian American experience as well.
So, long-time lurker, first time commenter here. :)
I would tend to agree with Tanglethis. It’s always exciting to have the opportunity to teach something you enjoy and share your passion with students, but when you’re teaching such a specific field – and one that has been so hard won by multiple activists working for decades inside and outside academia – it’s important to think about the political choice you’re making by perhaps stepping outside the boundaries of the field. If this were just a “20th century literature” class it may be different, but since there’s a unique and specific Asian American experience that’s elucidated in Asian American literature and ethnic studies, adding something that doesn’t necessarily belong might ultimately be a bit problematic politically as well as pedagogically.
However, I LOVE using comics in the classroom. If you haven’t read American Born Chinese, by Gene Yang, you should do so immediately – it might be a nice thing to add, should you choose to forgo Persepolis.
You could always include Persepolis on a supplementary reading list, along with the reasons you list, but not include it in the official course syllabus. As it is, I would say that there is a substantial difference between Asian Diaspora literature and even literature detailing the relationship between Asia and the West to Asian-American literature, in which I would think the emphasis would be specifically on American experience (though obviously, this would vary from book to book).
Out of curiosity, what other novels are you planning on covering in this course?
I just wanted to second the recommendation of American Born Chinese.
Do you need Persepolis as a building block for more recent works? Do other works you are teaching refer to this book, in style, publication history or artistically? If not, I think it’s rather a stretch.
Thanks for these useful and insightful comments. I have a feeling, though, that the question, at least in practical terms, is going to be moot. As of yesterday, only 6 students were registered for the course and that is almost certainly not enough for it to run. I am still interested in the question, though, and I am realizing that there are some details of my situation that I left out. I teach at a community college which does not have an English major, or anything resembling a formal concentration in literature, which means that my students–assuming the class runs–will almost certainly be taking the class because they need to fulfill general education, or other, requirements. In other words, they will not be, most of them, and probably all of them, at all interested in the question “What is Asian-American literature?” from the intellectual/critical point of view that I have (implicitly) asked it here.
This fact about my students, I realize, argues pretty clearly for a very orthodox approach to the question–my own newness in the field aside, for the moment–since they will need both the facts and the basic context that approach provides. At the same time, though, my decision to include something Iranian–and there are plenty of good Iranian-American choices out there; I asked about Persepolis because I think it raises interesting questions–is precisely to break the stereotype that Iran is not Asian, that it is part of the Middle East, which most people in this country, consciously or not, identify as Israel and the Arab countries. I am consistently frustrated–though no longer surprised, now that I have been married to an Iranian for 16 years–at the way most people conflate Iranians and Arabs. There is an Arab ethnic minority in the south of Iran, but Iran is not an Arab country in the way that Saudi Arabia is, or Iraq, or Morocco. It is Asian, and some pretty important Asian and Asian-American institutions–like the Asia Society and the Asian American Writers Workshop–have begun to recognize this, even though Persian Studies as an academic field remains firmly ensconced (as far as I can tell) in Middle Eastern Studies.
Regarding the books I have chosen: this is a very tentative list, and now that the course’s running is so uncertain, I am reluctant to put much more thought into it: The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan; China Men, by Maxine Hong Kingston; Imago, by Joesph Legaspi; The Blood of Flowers, by Anita Amirrezvani. And then I need to find something South Asian. So I would have Chinese-American, Filipino-American, Iranian-American and then whatever other work I pick.
The underlying question in my post, though, remains very interesting to me, not only, but especially because it raises questions about the relationship between works in translation and the body of work in the target language of those translations. I realize that it is a question, as mommyfortuna points out, fraught with political implications and consequences–and, as a Jewish American, I am not uninvested in those implications and consequences–but I still think it is important to ask:
Are ethnic American literatures directly and irrevocably related, in an almost cause-and-effect way, to the ethnic American identities out of which they emerge; or does/should the notion of any given ethnic American literature include works like Persepolis, the author of which is “hyphenated,” though not in the States, and which has been made “American” by virtue of the language into which it has been translated? Is the relationship, in other words, between the literature and the identity more like a Venn diagram?
What do we gain/lose by seeing things this way? While the question presents itself to me quite obviously in the case of Persepolis, would it be as obvious for other dispersed ethnic groups? In other words, would it make sense to think in this way if the work in question had been originally written in Spanish by someone of Chinese or Arab origin?
Does this question only make sense when the subject of the translated work is an immigrant/exilic experience? I am thinking here about works like those of Shahrnush Parsipour, which are banned in Iran and can only be published in translation outside of that country; or of Huang Xiang, whose situation in terms of China is the same; or even of someone like Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote in Yiddish, but whose works were all published in translation. Would the books produced by these people be considered ethnic American literature? (It seems to me that Bashevis Singer is considered Jewish American literature, so maybe the question of time needs to be factored in here as well.)
Anyway, the questions could go on and on, so I will stop there.
What about Wayson Choy?
Lilian,
Can you tell me a little bit more about him?
If you do end up needing another book, I’m going to recommend Truong’s The Book of Salt. It does engage in a sort of exotification of food culture that seems to be a kind of pattern in some contemporary As-Am fiction (c.f. the effect that publishing houses have on the kind of books that are available). But it also layers up intersecting oppressions in a fascinating way. The protag is a gay Vietnamese man who trains as a French cook in colonial Vietnam and finds himself in Paris working as Gertrude Stein’s cook, so there’s a lot of push and pull of various power dynamics: exile/expatriate/native; white/POC; male/female; straight/gay; cook/chef; and so forth. The book has its flaws but it’s one of the most nuanced depictions of intersection I’ve ever enjoyed reading.
The other book I was thinking of, though I can’t remember the title off the top of my head, was Comfort Woman. I tried teaching Native Son once, but my students had a really hard time following it. What I don’t have, other than M. are any good recommendations for drama.
Wayson Choy has written some beautiful novels, but he’s Chinese-Canadian, not Chinese-American.
It’s too bad about the lack of student interest in your course. Hopefully you’ll have another opportunity in the future.
Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing is super. When/if you have the class why have you chosen China Men from her listings, compared to say Warrior Woman? Just curious. The arguments against Persepolis for your class seem good enough that putting it on a supplemental list sounds like a good idea, IMHO. I hope you get to run it this time around…if not, you have more time to consider your options if it comes around again.
Eva: I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose The Joy Luck Club (which deals a lot with women) and a book dealing with men, and I didn’t want to do two Hong Kingston books.
If the class is being offered as being Asian-American literature, I agree with those above who have said that unless you’re including Persepolis to demonstrate its having been highly influential in this particular area (and to be honest, I was not aware that it was), it doesn’t belong on the main reading list. Aside from the lack of American-ness, while I agree that the recurrent lumping of Iran with “Arab” is extremely annoying, I am not sure why you seem to think it is more “Asian” than Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia et al., since in the division of the world into continents, those countries are all also included in Asia, just as Egypt is included in Africa. The “Middle East” is a cultural region that overlaps West Asia, and while dominated by Arab culture, I think it includes Persian culture as well. I suppose if there is no Middle East class at your college, it would be appropriate to categorize much of the Middle East as Asian so it doesn’t fall through the continental cracks, but otherwise I don’t think it fits.
Suggestion if the class comes together in the future: for South Asian-American literature, I’d recommend either Anita Desai’s “Fasting, Feasting” or her daughter Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss.” The elder Desai lived most of her life in India before moving briefly to England and then to the U.S., while her daughter moved to the U.S. with her at age 15. Both books’ storylines focus on India but also deal with young male characters who struggle with life in the United States. I think they both give a solid idea about life in India as well as some of the difficulties of the immigrant experience.
If you wanted books that are set pretty much entirely in the U.S., I really liked Rishi Reddi’s short story collection “Karma and Other Stories,” which is about my family’s language group (Telugus). I thought it really got what it is like for the grandparents who come late in life to join their immigrant children, for those immigrants themselves, for their American-born offspring — it is really sensitive to all the different kinds of problems that each generation faces. I feel like immigrant fiction, since it’s written by the immigrants or their American-born kids, often ignores the oldest generation, the grandparents who come over to take care of grandkids or because their children are anxious about them or because they need medical care, so I love Reddi’s book for including stories from that generation’s perspective.
PG:
Iranians, at least those that I know and know of, would disagree with you here, and it does seem to me that Iranian own sense of themselves should be given priority over whatever we might think about how the world should be divided. Iran’s inclusion in the Middle East, as I understand it, has as much to do with oil and the Islamic Revolution as anything else, and, anyway, the whole notion of a “middle east” is a convenience of a Western perspective anyway. More, at least among some Iranians, there is the sense that Iran’s inclusion in the Middle East legitimizes the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran in the 7th century and renders Iranian culture and history, much of which is separate from Arab and Muslim culture and history, invisible. And, finally, in my own experience–though I would never try to make this a foundation of an argument, since my experience is, admittedly, limited–Persian culture has at least as much in common with Afghanistan, and even India and Pakistan, as it does with the Arab world. Persian was the language of the Moghul courts, and Iran’s cultural influence extends into Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the other “stans” as well.
This is not something I have made a careful study of, and so I am thinking my way through this as I write.
Also, thanks for the book suggestions. I have noted them down. We’ll see if the class runs.
Edited to add: This is from Wikipedia. I have not read it critically, since I don’t have the time right now, but I am pasting it in as an illustration of just how slippery the term Middle East is:
Iranians, at least those that I know and know of, would disagree with you here, and it does seem to me that Iranian own sense of themselves should be given priority over whatever we might think about how the world should be divided.
Agreed; I just wasn’t aware that Iranians themselves thought of themselves as decidedly Asian and simultaneously definitely NOT Middle Eastern. As I’ve mentioned, in a continent sense most of the Middle East is West Asia, and I can’t find any conception of “Asia” in which Iran is included but no Arab countries are — any kind of Asian conference or sporting event that includes Iran seems to include Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, et al. as well. My objection isn’t to the idea of Iran as belonging to Asia so much as to what seems to be — and I might be getting this totally wrong, so apologize in advance if I am — your reasoning that Iran belongs to Asia but those “Middle Eastern” countries don’t.
More, at least among some Iranians, there is the sense that Iran’s inclusion in the Middle East legitimizes the Arab Muslim conquest of Iran in the 7th century and renders Iranian culture and history, much of which is separate from Arab and Muslim culture and history, invisible. And, finally, in my own experience–though I would never try to make this a foundation of an argument, since my experience is, admittedly, limited–Persian culture has at least as much in common with Afghanistan, and even India and Pakistan, as it does with the Arab world. Persian was the language of the Moghul courts, and Iran’s cultural influence extends into Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the other “stans” as well.
The Moghul courts of India and Pakistan existed in the first place because of Muslim conquest of that area. Why should that be “legitimized” any more than Arab Muslims’ conquest of Iran? Moreover, if this is a matter of geographic coverage, you don’t seem to be including Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) in your book list at all, though there are two books by East Asian-Americans.
PG:
I suppose I should have put my first usage of the term Middle East in scare quotes, because it’s not that I think the other countries you name are not part of Asia, but rather that I was thinking about about the way the term “middle east” is commonly understood in this country. I tend to try to avoid the term at all, except when referring to something like the Middle Eastern Studies Association or academic departments, etc. precisely because the term is so imprecise and because of its imperial/colonial history. (This is not to say that I am always successful, just that I try.) The question of what term to use to talk about the areas of the world commonly called Middle East and Asia is still a contested one. So you have some anthologists using Middle East and including Iran and, say, Arab Andalusia (which would be present-day Spain); and you have other anthologists that do include “middle eastern” countries in Asia; and still others who simply group the Middle East and Asia into the same anthology. It’s a healthy debate because it gets at the question of who gets to choose the terms–with all their ideological baggage–that are used to talk about which parts of the world and how those terms are connected to identities, national, ethnic and otherwise.
My example about the Moghul courts was a careless one, and I should not have included it. The Persian cultural influence in Central Asia, however, does predate the Muslim conquest, and my overall point about the legitimization of the Muslim conquest of Persia does still hold.
Finally, about my book list: Any book list is going to be limited by certain necessary choices, shaped in part by what an instructor knows, who her or his students are, what he or she can teach, etc. I know of one book of poems by an Afghani-American writer, but I am not sure it merits inclusion as a book, and I simply don’t know of any “Central-Asian-American” writers (to use a catchall term) whose works would be appropriate to include. Doesn’t mean they don’t exist, and that I shouldn’t try to find them, if the course runs; I just don’t know about them now. (Actually, now that I think of it, I have heard of a couple of memoirs; the titles escape me now; but, again, I don’t know if they would merit inclusion (meaning I don’t know how good they are) simply because of their authors’ ethnic identities.) There are also no Southeast Asian-American writers on my list, and that would be another gap I would need to fill.
Native Son? Oh, you mean Native Speaker.
Don Lee’s Yellow is a beautifully-written short story cycle about (East) Asian-American men.
Jhumpa Lahiri could conceivably be a candidate for (South)Asian-American fiction.
I gotta say, Richard, I love your work on this blog; but I’m really struggling to figure out your comment #7. How does a piece of Iranian diasporic literature written in French become “Asian-American”? By that reckoning, Kundera, another exile from an oppressive society who writes in French, is also “ethnic American literature.”
Just wanted to say that I’m so excited that you’re teaching Anita Amirrevzani’s The Blood of Flowers! I loved that book–thought it was such a thoughtful example of historical fiction–and would love to see it get wider currency.
If you want to add memoir-essay nonfiction, especially in easily-excerptable does, two other books I strongly recommend are The Accidental Asian by Eric Liu, a collection of essays by a prominent member of the Clinton administration modeled on James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and Kenji Yoshino’s Covering. (My partner actually teaches them back-to-back in a multicultural lit class, and they work well together, because Yoshino critiques Liu.)
I also recommend Yoshino because I think Japanese-American experiences have been so significantly different from Chinese-American ones, and they are too often subsumed into each other. Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story collection Seventeen Syllables is probably the obvious choice for historical importance reasons (esp the famous short story set in an internment camp) but I would also recommend Ruth Ozeki’s more contemporary My Year of Meats, which really resonates with many, if the inclusion of a rape scene doesn’t disqualify it.
Covering is fantastic — it goes a long way to explaining some of the subtler effects of various kinds of bigotries, not just racial ones.
Josh: First, thanks for catching my Native Son gaffe.
I am less interested in whether or not Persepolis itself would actually qualify in any way as Asian American literature–though my own immediate, unconscious assumption that it belonged there is where this post began–than in the questions about literary categories that I have tried to ask–and maybe I have not asked them well; and I may be only confusing things even more by what I am about to write. I am wondering about what it means to make a literary category an outgrowth of/coincide with an identity–either of an individual writer or of a group. It is related to the question that often gets asked of “minority” writers: Are you a woman/gay/Jewish/Black/Latino/Asian/etc. writer or a writer who happens to be a woman/gay/Jewish/Black/Latino/Asian/etc? Most writers that I know think the question sets up a false dichotomy/choice and that it reinscribes the status quo in all kinds of subtle (and not so subtle) ways. I am not sure how to word it, but the question I want to ask has to do with whether or not the insistence that ethnic-American literature as a genre is tied irrevocably to the various identities of its authors–as opposed to, say, the relationship between the language in which it is written and the subject(s) it deals with–sets up the same false dichotomy, except within the genre itself.
If a white writer writes a novel that convincingly presents an aspect of the African-American context; if his or her characters are persuasive, as “real” on their own terms as anything written by an African-American author–is that novel an African-American novel? If a white African, from South Africa or wherever, whose family immigrated to the US, grows up to be a writer, is he or she an African-American writer? Are her or his novels, poems, whatever, even if they have nothing to do with what the term “African-American experience” cannot help but mean in the US, African-American novels? Would a novel written by, say, a Nigerian-American writer who came to the States under the same circumstances, be African-American? (I don’t know if Chris Abani has been here long enough, but he might be someone like the person I am talking about. Nahid Rachlin, who was born in Iran and came here when she went to college, who writes entirely in English, is another example, though from a different group.)
I realize that Persepolis is different from both these cases entirely, but this is the train of thought of which my question about Persepolis was a part. And I am not trying to be flip or in any way to suggest that there ought not be a category that holds the literature produced by Americans of African descent (I hope that is not an offensive term; I am trying to be descriptive), but whenever you make a category, you exclude things from it, and it’s interesting, and often of not a little consequence, to think about what the terms of that exclusion are, what gets left out and why and what happens if you try to turn the exclusion on its head, or inside out or whatever. Inevitably, you learn something, hopefully something worthwhile.
Anyway, that’s a long ramble that is not supposed to be arguing with you, Josh, or even really directed at you; it’s just what came to me as I thought about your comment.
Zahra: I really liked Blood of Flowers, and I think it will be a lot of fun to teach.
And to all: Again, I want to say thanks for the book recommendations. I am making a list.
I know of one book of poems by an Afghani-American writer, but I am not sure it merits inclusion as a book, and I simply don’t know of any “Central-Asian-American” writers (to use a catchall term) whose works would be appropriate to include.
I haven’t read them, but I hear Khaled Hosseini’s (Afghanistan-born, currently a U.S. citizen) books are considered reasonably accessible, and “The Kite Runner” is set partly in the U.S. (in Fremont, CA).
Thanks, PG, for reminding me about The Kite Runner, which I haven’t read, but which would be good to look at.
It is really weird the way RJN seems to want to exclude Arab countries from Asia while simultaneously stressing how Asian Iran is.
Since Iran is not Arab, I don’t see anything weird about it.