Beyond the culture ghetto: Asian American class critique and the ethnographic bildungsroman

This dissertation contributes an Asian American class critique to Asian American literary studies in particular and American literary studies in general. It expands the modestly growing body of literary criticism that takes class as a central theoretical axis, along with its intersections with race, culture and gender, instead of the more common culture-based epistemologies. I argue that cultural epistemologies obscure the structural hierarchies of race and class that limit Asian Americans\u27 socio-economic prospects. Cultural epistemologies have produced nuanced critiques of topics like assimilation, multiculturalism, transnationalism and the impact of externally levied racializations on cultural difference. At least one question remains insufficiently examined: How do poverty and other class limitations contribute to Asian Americans\u27 sense of racial-cultural difference? Neglecting this question affirms an institutional and social milieu in which Asian American subjectivity is understood as primarily cultural. The pressures of this milieu make paradigmatic at least two literary forms in mainstream Asian American literature—ethnography, which provides an “insider\u27s view” of Asian culture, and cultural bildung , the subject\u27s integration into the American polity via assimilation or idealized multiculturalism. These conventions converge in a form that I describe as the Asian American ethnographic bildungsroman. Focusing on ethnographic bildungsromans that delineate life and labor in and around Chinatown, Koreatown and Little Tokyo, the most visible sites of racialized class regulation, I argue that ethnography reconfigures racialized class stratification as cultural expression, while cultural bildung renders assimilation the means to class mobility, disavowing structural influences of racialized class. The texts produce class critiques by both accommodating and resisting these forms as well as engender possibilities for empirical political protest. They also address class variation, staging ostensible middle class ascension. I argue that certain so-called middle class Asian American groups continue to be regulated by racialized class by redefining class and class mobility beyond income level. Asian Americans thus present a “category crisis” in American conceptions of class and class mobility. My methodology is literary while my scope is intertextual and interdisciplinary as I integrate close readings of literary texts with historical and sociological accounts, voices of laborer-activists, as well as popular and media representations