Narrating Nationalisms

Jinqi Ling's new book rereads works by John Okada, Louis Chu, Frank Chin, and Maxine Kingston in order to reconceptualize the relationship between the past and present of postwar Asian American literary theory history. Ling challenges uncritical adoption of posthumanist views of history, agency, and identity in Asian American cultural criticism and proposes an approach to Asian American literature that simultaneously registers its synchronic and diachronic, materialist and discursive dimensions.