Asian American Hypocrisy

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Not much has changed since 1899 when Onoto Watanna and Sui Sin Far—the Eaton Sisters—confronted the dreaded binary that seems perpetually to define Asian Americans as either "model minorities" or "bad subjects," as those who either collaborate with or resist corrupt American racial practices. A century later, the "mainstream Asian American intellectual class," inclusive of "academics, artists, activists, and nonacademic critics," still struggles with this rhetorical burden, at times incapable of collapsing this problematic binary, other times intentionally reaffirming it for personal gain, so argues Viet Thanh Nguyen in Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. Moreover, according to Nguyen, Asian American creative writers…show more content…
In other words, Asian American intellectuals—and literary critics in particular—want to eat the cake of accommodation and have the cake of resistance…show more content…
There may very well be a pattern of groupthink behavior categorically attributable to Asian American intellectuals. It may very well be that most Asian American critics have tended and still "tend to see texts as demonstrating either resistance or accommodation to American racism" and all those Asian American panethnic entrepreneurs may very well be "deeply invested in stable categories of racial identification." But the burden of proof to demonstrate this claim rests on Nguyen's shoulders, does it not? By failing to do so, or rather by choosing not to do so, by not naming names, Nguyen tacitly asks us to simply take his word for it. (This is a polemical strategy not unlike the one found in Garrett Hongo's "Introduction" to The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, where the disgruntled poet accuses Asian American studies of "facism," "bigotry," and "ethnic fundamentalism," behaving like Ayatollah Khomeinis to the Salman Rushdies of Asian American creative writers. Neither does Hongo name

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