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Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture. By Tina Chen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Tina Chen's Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture is a literary-critical tour deforce that proposes a hermeneutics of Asian American subjectivity and identity through the trope of impersonation. The title's play on the term, "double agent," references Cold War era-derived anxieties about Asian stealth and shiftiness while reworking racist linkages between Asian-raced peoples and espionage. In her readings of a wide variety of cultural productions, Chen eschews both 1970s cultural-nationalist claims to authenticity and 1990s theories of performativity developed by (white) gender and queer theorists. In doing so, she develops a critical framework for reconsidering Asian American racial formation in ways that transcend static models of culture and cultural transmission, on the one hand, and materially-unmoored celebrations of identity performance, on the other.
In Part I of the book, titled "Impersonation and Stereotype," Chen notes that impersonation (especially of racist caricatures) as economic and social survival strategy has been a site of ambivalence for Asian America given that Asian American people have historically been coerced into adopting and displaying behaviors that are discomfiting precisely because they uphold and maintain damaging ideas about racial minorities. But rather than condemn impersonation as a practice that emerges solely out of racial subjugation, Chen chooses to reclaim it both as a mode of literary-critical analysis and as a site of agency, arguing that Asian American subject formation itself arises from an ongoing process of performing assumed roles that complicate notions of an authentic or true identity. Creating a distinction between "impersonation" and a related term, "imposture," Chen avers that, whereas imposture strives to effect a seamless and convincing counterfeit for the purposes of deception, impersonation involves "the assumption of a public identity that does not necessarily belong to 'someone else' but that has been assigned to and subsequently adopted by the performer in question in order to articulate an identity comprehensible to the public" (14). In the...