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Sheng-mei Ma. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998),188 pp., $19.95 (paper).
Sheng-mei Ma's book addresses gaps in Asian American, postcolonial, and modem Chinese studies, and contributes to an emerging dialogue among these three fields, by comparing representations of immigrant subjectivities in literary texts by Asian Americans, and literary and cinematic texts by Taiwanese authors. Although the text is nominally divided into three parts, Parts One and Two are closely linked by their focus on Asian American literary texts, while Part Three stakes a claim for the urgency and relevance of Taiwanese literary and film texts to contemporary cultural studies. Although the first two parts are perceptive and well-informed both about the appropriate literary histories and eclectically cited theoretical debates, Ma's most original contributions, from an Americanist standpoint, occur in his readings of texts outside the Asian American literary canon, in his account of the "Immigrant Schizophrenic," and his careful introduction of Taiwanese overseas literature, nativist literature, and Taiwanese American film into dialogue with Asian American, Chinese, and postcolonial studies.
In Part One, "The Representation of the Asian Other," Ma examines the ideological significance and unifying tropes in a range of Asian American texts portraying Asian immigrants, in an approach reminiscent of Sau-ling Wong's groundbreaking 1993 study (Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance). In "Native Informants and Ethnographic Feminism in Asian American Texts," Ma argues that Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and radio playwright D. Roberts negotiate their entry into the American literary marketplace by positioning themselves as feminist ethnographers presenting Asian mothers as "native informants" about a more or less exoticized Chinese culture. "Orientalism in...