Theorizing Southeast Asian American Literature: Border-Crossings in Time, Space, and Race

ABSTRACT Southeast Asian American literature, once seen as emergent and marginal, has undergone a proliferation of creative and critical production over the last two decades. Nonetheless, the corpus remains undertheorized as a discrete field of study and is typically analyzed in terms of war and refugee narratives by Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong writers. This article argues for an expanded definition that encompasses works by authors with heritage of a wider Southeast Asian region, including Filipino, Indonesian, Malaysian, Singaporean, Burmese, and Thai American writing. In reviewing English-language prose (mainly fiction) published to date, this article presents a brief overview of historical and ongoing trends in the developing canon. It finds abiding concerns with shared global histories of European colonialism and Cold War imperialism; a border-crossing approach to postcolonial nation-states; and variances in the phenomenon of racialization and Asian American panethnicity within a transnational frame. The study of Southeast Asian American literature, especially when it considers the experiences of different groups more comparatively, illuminates a subjecthood marked by multiplicity and points to a distinct cultural and political strain within Asian American and US literature.