Scrutinized!: Surveillance in Asian North American Literature

Monica Chiu

Published by University of Hawaii Press 2014

Scrutinized!

Surveillance in Asian North American Literature

Monica Chiu
Edited by: Russell Leong and David K. Yoo

Volume 42 in the series Intersections: Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824838430

Overview
Contents

About this book

Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field, Don Lee’s Country of Origin, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Susan Choi’s A Person of Interest. These and a host of other Asian North American detection and mystery titles were published between 1995 and 2010. Together they reference more than a decade of Asian North America monitoring that includes internment, campaign financing, espionage, and post-9/11 surveillance. However, these works are less concerned with solving crimes than with creating literary responses to the subtle but persistent surveillance of raced subjects. In Scrutinized! Monica Chiu reveals how Asian North American novels’ fascination with mystery, detection, spying, and surveillance is a literary response to anxieties over race. According to Chiu, this allegiance to a genre that takes interruptions to social norms as its foundation speaks to a state of unease at a time of racial scrutiny.

Scrutinized! is broadly about oversight and insight. The race policing of the past has been subsumed under post-racism—an oversight (in the popular nomenclature of race blindness) that is still, ironically, based on a persistent visual construction of race. Detective fiction’s focus on scrutiny presents itself as the most appropriate genre for revealing the failures of a so-called post-racialism in which we continue to deploy visually defined categories of race as social realities—a regulatory mechanism under which Asian North Americans live the paradox of being inscrutable. To be looked at and overlooked is the contradiction that drives the book’s thesis. Readers first revisit Oriental visions, or Asian stereotypes, and then encounter official documentation on major events, such as the Japanese American and Japanese Canadian internment. The former visions, which endure, and the latter documents, diplomatically forgotten, shape how Asian subjects were and are scrutinized and to what effect. They determine which surveillance images remain emblazoned in a nation’s collective memory and which face political burial. The book goes on to provide a compelling analysis of mystery and detective fiction by Lee, Nina Revoyr, Choi, Suki Kim, Sakamoto, and Hamid, whose work exploits the genre’s techniques to highlight pervasive vigilance among Asian North American subjects.

Author / Editor information

Chiu Monica :

Monica Chiu is associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.Yoo David K. :

David K. Yoo is vice provost, Institute of American Cultures, and professor of Asian American studies and history at the University of California, Los Angeles.Monica Chiu is associate professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1. Introduction: Under Scrutiny Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Racial Playgrounds: Illusion and Danger in Don Lee’s Country of Origin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	28
3. The Conspicuous Subjects of Interracial Spaces in Nina Revoyr’s Southland Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	48
4. Persistent Vigilance and Racial Longing in Choi’s Person of Interest and Kim’s The Interpreter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	68
5. Intimate Details: Scrutiny and Evidentiary Photographs in Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	96
6. Double Surveillance in Mohsin Hamid’s the Reluctant Fundamentalist Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	112
7. Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	134
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179

Language: English
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 192

eBook

Published: January 31, 2014
ISBN: 9780824838430