The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern
Languages and Literatures at Laurentian University.

Eleanor Ty’s premise is that, paradoxically, the politics of the
visible is also about invisibility. While Asian Canadians are part of
Canada’s “visible minorities,” their “visible” difference
marks them as other and non-major, effectively making them invisible in
mainstream public and cultural spheres up until the last 20-some years;
Asian Americans, because of the black–white divide of American
politics, have been marginalized and rendered invisible because they
fall between the two polarities.

In her introduction, Ty offers a brief overview of historical reasons
for invisibility and contemporary politics of visibility. She
purposefully transgresses Canadian–American boundaries because of the
commonalities she sees in the circumstances shared by North American
Asian communities. She makes no claim to an exhaustive study,
deliberately choosing and mixing non-canonical works of fiction,
biography, and autobiography that stress and illustrate her ideas on the
politics of the visible and its connection with identity. She describes
her theoretical approach as a “creative hybrid,” using “Asian
American and Asian Canadian socio-cultural history, feminist theories of
the subject, psychoanalytic and psycholinguistic insights, postcolonial
and post-structuralist theories.”

Ty divides her nine authors into three sections. In “Visuality,
Representation, and the Gaze,” she focuses on works that challenge
mainstream portrayals and cultural expectations. Denise Chong’s The
Concubine’s Children, for example, de-exoticizes the Oriental other
and suggests “new ways of reading and recording women’s lives and
histories.” In “Transformations through the Sensual,” Ty studies
protagonists who transform themselves in order to negotiate their
invisibility, a strategy that becomes a site of creative empowerment. In
Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife, Ty examines the problematic ways
in which food, cooking, and meals are used culturally to both
circumscribe and empower female identity. The third section,
“Invisible Minorities in Asian America,” deals with marginalized
Asian Americans, focusing on issues of power and abjection in the
community or the group. Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms, Ty
concludes, reconfigures Asian-Canadian identity and the traditional
Canadian immigrant story.

Ty hopes that her work will generate new interest in the authors she
has studied and contribute to the ongoing conversation begun by
Asian-American scholars. It does.