Dr Harriet Stilley: ‘No matter where I was, I was a Chinaman, and I could never be anyone else.’ Contesting Gender and Genre in Contemporary Asian American Crime Fiction
Dr Harriet Stilley
The succeeding decades of the Vietnam War saw a proliferation of Asian American literary production. With the arrival of such writers as Dale Furutani, Henry Chang, Chang-rae Lee, and Ed Lin, this involved the unprecedented entrance of Asian American authors into the crime genre. This entry is especially noteworthy as it was rooted in a departure from, if not a dismantling of, the invidiously white, male cultural bias through which the genre has traditionally been conceptualised.
This paper explores the intricate relationship between ethnicity, masculinity, and the crime novel, asking how and to what extent Asian American crime novelists exploit the complexities and ambiguities of the genre to challenge or problematize its conventional Orientalist vocabulary and the purported lack of a male-oriented Asian American heroic tradition. Firstly, by focusing on several Asian American novelists who have not yet received sufficient critical attention - in particular, Chinese American author Ed Lin - I will discuss how my research at large aims to write an inclusive history of the relationship between masculinity and the crime genre during this period, bringing marginalised racial identities to the forefront of literary enquiry. Secondly, I will outline how this project seeks to trouble disciplinary conventions; specifically, I will demonstrate the ways in which the project is characterised by a provocative redefinition of crime fiction as a white male medium, thereby problematizing ideas of categorisation and genre. I will simultaneously take issue with the racial hierarchies that continue to inform American cultural studies, particularly the historical reduction of Asian Americans to a singular ethnic group characterised by passivity. Finally, my paper will expand upon the work done by a number of recent texts that explore how masculinities are codified, communicated, and challenged through American culture and literature, and interrogate how healthy formulations of masculinity can be promoted both nationally and universally, thus presenting an especially timely intervention with literary criticism.
Indeed, by thinking about the crime genre via prisms of ethnicity and masculinity, this paper will underscore how paying attention to the genre’s various formal features elucidates invisible or forgotten narratives, overlooked relationships and identities, and critically neglected forms of American cultural production.