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    Writing the Ghetto
    Class, Authorship, and the Asian American Ethnic Enclave

    Yoonmee Chang (Author)

    9780813548012

    Hardback, published 8 November 2010

    208 pages, 2 illustrations.
    22.9 x 15.2 x 2.8 cm, 0.567 kg

    "Chang's excellent book makes a compelling case for why Asian American critics need to use the 'ghetto' as a paradigm and marshals ample evidence to show the ways Asian American literature supports such a provocative claim."
    - Viet Thanh Nguyen (author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America)
    "Yoonmee Chang's elegantly written, deftly argued, and meticulously developed Writing the Ghetto makes a valuable contribution to our understanding and appreciation of Asian American social history and literature. This is an important book."
    - Elaine H. Kim (University of California, Berkeley)
    "Chang's argument is nuanced, provocatively counterintuitive, and occasionally dizzying. Writing the Ghetto is an important text not only for Asian American scholars, but for American and ethnic studies scholars interested in interrogating the politics, economics, and ethics of belonging."
    (Modern Fiction Studies)

    In the United States, perhaps no minority group is considered as "model" or successful as the Asian American community. Rather than living in ominous "ghettoes," Asian Americans are described as residing in positive-sounding "ethnic enclaves." Writing the Ghetto helps clarify the hidden or unspoken class inequalities faced by Asian Americans, while insightfully analyzing the effect such notions have had on their literary voices.

    Yoonmee Chang examines the class structure of Chinatowns, Koreatowns, Little Tokyos, and Little Indias, arguing that ghettoization in these spaces is disguised. She maintains that Asian American literature both contributes to and challenges this masking through its marginalization by what she calls the "ethnographic imperative." Chang discusses texts from the late nineteenth century to the present, including those of Sui Sin Far, Winnifred Eaton, Monica Sone, Fae Myenne Ng, Chang-rae Lee, S. Mitra Kalita, and Nam Le. These texts are situated in the contexts of the Chinese Exclusion Era, Japanese American internment during World War II, the globalization of Chinatown in the late twentieth century, the Vietnam War, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the contemporary emergence of the "ethnoburb."

    1 Introduction: The Asian American Ghetto 1
    2 “Like a Slum”: Ghettos and Ethnic Enclaves, Ghetto and Genre 25
    3 The Japanese American Internment: Master Narratives and Class Critique 70
    4 Chinese Suicide: Political Desire and Queer Exogamy 111
    5 Ethnic Entrepreneurs: Korean American Spies, Shopkeepers, and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots 135
    6 Indian Edison: The Ethnoburbian Paradox and Corrective Ethnography 176
    Conclusion: The Postracial Aesthetic and Class Visibility 201
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