Routledge contributes another entry to this growing field (see also Asian American Women’s Popular Literature (Thoma, 2014) and Interracial Encounters (Lee, 2011). This Companion is edited by the Associate Professor of English at the University of California Los Angeles, whose research focuses on Asian American literature. Divided into three parts: keywords; geographies, literary ethnoscopes and historical periods; and genre, form and the paraliterary. Although the Introduction is a somewhat too “jargon-rich” for the initiate, it gives important background to and justification for the work.
Instead of brief definitions, the Keywords section offers substantial essays that explore each term in its literary and cultural contexts. It is not meant to be used as a ready reference by the student, but arms them with knowledge that will help in interpreting these terms when encountered in texts. In one instance, Leslie Bow’s discussion of Fetish explores how Caucasian males’ attraction to any Asian woman can be viewed as fetishistic; her Asian-ness is visual code for docility, submission and eagerness to please only him. The woman is not an individual but a fetishistic object onto which his ideals of womanhood can be projected. The geographies portion fixes each region in its own place in the larger constellation and helps the reader see both where they overlap and how they differ. Korean War Fiction, for example, merits its own entry. Daniel Kim offers “[…] a provisional mapping of the Asian American fiction of the Korean War and suggest[s] the ramifications for Asian American and American literary studies that come from the recognition of such a tradition” (p. 290). How some Americans view this conflict (a near-victory against Communism) and how some Koreans view it (a failed attempt at increasing American hegemony in the region) are central to the literary themes that arise from it. Genre explores everything from comic to pathography/illness narrative. In Song, Orality and Pop, Christine Bacareza Balance discusses Asian American poetry and protest song, karaoke and spoken word performances. She states, “(T)hrough the public and communal form of karaoke singing, the cultural texts of American and Asian pop songs activate and tap into shared affective experiences of longing, nostalgia, and homesickness” (p. 495).
An extensive bibliography follows each entry, so there is no larger one at the end of the work. A comprehensive index makes using this work for reference a breeze. This is a current, timely, well-researched and thoroughly documented reference. It is recommended for all world literature and popular culture collections.
