Asian American Literature and the Environment

Lorna Fitzsimmons,Youngsuk Chae,Bella Adams

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134676781
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Asian American Studies

This book is a ground-breaking transnational study of representations of the environment in Asian American literature. Extending and renewing Asian American studies and ecocriticism by drawing the two fields into deeper dialogue, it brings Asian American writers to the center of ecocritical studies. This collection demonstrates the distinctiveness of Asian American writers' positions on topics of major concern today: environmental justice, identity and the land, war environments, consumption, urban environments, and the environment and creativity. Represented authors include Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ruth Ozeki, Ha Jin, Fae Myenne Ng, Le Ly Hayslip, Lan Cao, Mitsuye Yamada, Lawson Fusao Inada, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Milton Murayama, Don Lee, and Hisaye Yamamoto. These writers provide a range of perspectives on the historical, social, psychological, economic, philosophical, and aesthetic responses of Asian Americans to the environment conceived in relation to labor, racism, immigration, domesticity, global capitalism, relocation, pollution, violence, and religion. Contributors apply a diversity of critical frameworks, including critical radical race studies, counter-memory studies, ecofeminism, and geomantic criticism. The book presents a compelling and timely "green" perspective through which to understand key works of Asian American literature and leads the field of ecocriticism into neglected terrain.

Part I
The Environment and Labor

1 Environmental Narratives of American Identity

Landscape and Belonging in Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men and Milton Murayama's All I Asking for Is My Body

Andrea Aebersold

Historically, the American landscape has been closely tied to American identity: the freedom to own land, work the land, and explore the land represent the rights of a free American. In particular, the landscape of the American West often plays a defining role in American mythology as a place of rugged individuality and opportunity; it embodies the spirit of adventure and conquest. Historian Donald Worster argues that different groups of people around the globe associate the American West with cowboys, horses, gunfights, and wide open spaces. As a result, “the West has come to symbolize the whole national identity of the United States.”¹ However, the role of Asian immigrants in the history of the American West has been downplayed, even ignored at times. The mythology does not imagine them as a part of the American identity that is embedded in the very land itself. Indeed, Hsuan Hsu points out that “[w]hether or not they contain any truth with regard to other groups, frontier stereotypes such as freedom of movement, voluntary self-reinvention, individualism, and westwardness have seldom applied to Asian immigrants and their descendants.”² The same landscape that promised individual freedom has been used by dominant political and economic powers to prevent Asian immigrants from claiming American identity and citizenship.

The promise of individual freedom and economic opportunity through working the land brought many Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the sugar plantations in Hawaii. Yet once the immigrants arrived there, the plantation owners used low wages, long work hours, and poor living conditions to ensure that the immigrants could not become anything except an anonymous labor force. They were denied profits of the industry and their contributions were almost forgotten.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men (1980) and Milton Murayama’s All I Asking for Is My Body (1975) represent and resist this exclusion of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans through their literary portrayals of plantation work in Hawaii. These texts reveal how Chinese immigrants and Japanese Americans reacted to their work on the Hawaiian sugarcane plantations and how they conceptualized these landscapes in terms of their displacement and loss of self amidst the economic powerhouse of the United States. The landscape believed to represent individual freedom became a site of alienation as the plantation owners controlled the workers’ movements, finances, and living conditions.

Yet Kingston and Murayama also demonstrate how Asian immigrants and Asian Americans resisted exclusion by using the landscape to construct and define an American identity of their own. Through acts such as gardening and individual physical training, the characters in China Men and All I Asking for Is My Body work the land according to their values, rather than for others’ economic gain, and resist total erasure by the dominant culture by claiming part of America as their own. Both Kingston and Murayama write against traditional myths of the American West by inserting Asian American agency into history. They ultimately challenge and destabilize the master narrative of American citizenship by writing the land as a flexible concept that cannot be defined unilaterally.

Both Kingston and Murayama write about Asian American relationships with the environment as a means of challenging and redefining the history and meaning of the American West. Reading their works through an ecocritical lens offers an opportunity to advance the field through discussions of landscape and belonging. Asian American literature has not played a conspicuous role in ecocriticism, other than studies of Ruth Ozeki and Karen Tei Yamashita. Robert T. Hayashi argues that “[w]ith their common themes of immigration and acculturation, many Asian American literary works may seem unfit for ecocritical inquiry. Yet even works that stress such typical themes have much to say about how Asian Americans have experienced, described, and shaped their environments.”³ China Men and All I Asking for Is My Body bring themes of immigration and acculturation into an environmental context and successfully show how the two are not necessarily separate issues requiring different modes of inquiry.

A reassessment of ecocritical practice also helps eradicate stereotypical notions of Asian Americans as having less environmental awareness or concern. Both Kingston and Murayama incorporate the landscape into their works, although these representations have not been recognized as fitting into dominant ecocritical concerns of conserving nature or combating the hazards of poisoned environments. But instead of simply adding Asian American authors to the ecocritical canon, these works force a reconsideration of ecocritical inquiry itself by addressing issues of identity and citizenship and their relationships to the American landscape. This perspective offers benefits to other scholarly fields as well and asks us to reconsider what role the environment has played in the construction of American identity. In order to demonstrate this reconsideration, first I will briefly review ecocritical and historical oversights of Asian American literature as well as Hawaii’s place in the American West. Then I will examine a section of Kingston’s China Men and her recasting of both the Hawaiian landscape and Chinese immigrant relationships with the environment as inextricably linked to issues of identity and citizenship. Finally, I will discuss Murayama’s portrayal of landscape in All I Asking for Is My Body as both denying and creating individual identities for Japanese American plantation workers.

Asian American Ecocriticism and Hawaii as the American West

The study of Asian Americans and the environment is largely missing from mainstream historical and literary texts. Asian Americans’ reactions and relationships with the American landscape have been overlooked and overshadowed by studies of iconic figures such as Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, whose works focus on positive interactions with pristine wilderness and the protection of natural resources. At its onset, ecocriticism was slow to include works by writers of color in its scholarship and maintained a focus on standard definitions of nature and environment as wilderness. The Environmental Justice Movement centered its attention on urban environments and the adverse effects of pollution and other health threats on people of color and the poor. Yet, as scholars such as Hayashi and Julie Sze argue, much of environmental justice activism and literature focuses on contemporary issues without much examination of historical and cultural influences. Although Asian Americans do experience environmental threats, “their literature less directly addresses obvious examples of environmental racism or inequity, and so these texts may be easily overlooked by the ecocritic.”⁴ Perhaps another way of phrasing this idea is that Asian American literature contains examples of environmental racism and inequity that ecocriticism and environmental justice have yet to consider obvious. If “nature” and “environment” are reframed to include sites such as plantations, coal mines, and agricultural fields, more works of Asian American literature can be examined ecocritically. Examples of environmental racism become more prominent when definitions of the environment are expanded, as do examples of environmental connection through activities of resistance and redefinition.

Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick argues that the history of the western landscape comes from privileged sources, specifically, white people with power, education, and resources at their disposal, at the expense of other histories. In Limerick’s words, “Without a margin of assured subsistence, without the opportunity for contemplation and introspection, without a way to enter one’s memories into a permanent, written source, a group’s response to a new geography can be close to impossible for posterity to hear.”⁵ When studying accounts of the American West, Limerick points out that fewer records of Asian American environmental experiences do not mean that Asian Americans did not have a response to landscape. What it does mean is that they did not have access to the accepted means of recording their responses. Therefore, she argues, we have to look to other sources such as literature, poetry, and graffiti. She claims that it is “a failure of records and not a failure of response” on behalf of Asian Americans that is responsible for so few studies.⁶

Like Asian immigrants and Asian Americans, Hawaii has been largely absent from historical and literary discussions of the American West. Its exclusion is due to a number of factors such as its lack of proximity to the mainland, its late recognition by the United States as a territory and then state, and its complex colonial and imperial background. John Whitehead argues that historians have excluded Hawaii from the American West because they believe that it does not share experiences or landscape with the mainland. But Whitehead shows how Hawaii has had major ties and connections to the West because “[t]he same forces of commercial expansion and Manifest Destiny that led to the acquisition of the Pacific Coast also flowed to Hawai’i.”⁷ Commercial expansion in Hawaii began in 1850 when foreigners were allowed to purchase land that had formerly belonged to the Hawaiian monarchy. White entrepreneurs were quick to buy up large tracts of land in order to create a new branch of the sugar industry. Like many other indigenous populations in the American West, native Hawaiians saw their land turned into a “commodity and thus began the subsequent loss of Hawaiians’ aina, or ‘land,’ that gave them their identity and attachment to the earth.”⁸

The sugar industry played a major role in the American economic presence in Hawaii, yet, as Ronald Takaki points out, it was immigrant labor that “enabled the planters to transform sugar production into Hawaii’s leading industry.”⁹ Immigrant labor became necessary because “[t]he native Hawaiian population was not large enough to furnish all of the needed laborers. In April 1850, during the California Gold Rush, the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society was formed for the purpose of finding enough additional workers to fulfill the demand for the developing sugar industry.”¹⁰ In 1852, the first group of Chinese laborers arrived in Hawaii, and, as more followed from Japan, the Philippines, and other countries, white plantation owners grew anxious about their own positions of power. As a result, workers were treated oppressively and “[a]ny disturbance was seen as a threat to the whites, who considered themselves the chosen, the only ones who should have power.”¹¹

When the U.S. Congress discussed making Hawaii a territory, the growing Asian immigrant population was one reason, as Whitehead points out, that the annexation of Hawaii stalled, because Americans balked at viewing the Hawaiian population as similar to their own: “The Asian migration that transformed Hawai’i’s population after 1875 clearly gave the islands a commonly shared social experience with many parts of the American West. But the mainland racism against the Chinese tended to exclude Hawai’i from the consciousness of the western region to which it was increasingly bound.”¹² So, despi...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature
• PART I The Environment and Labor
• PART II The Environment and Violence
• PART III The Environment and Philosophy
• Afterword: Slow and Structural Violence
• Contributors
• Index