This book argues that in the unprecedented globalizing, multi‐diasporic dynamics of our moment, what we have long thought of as “ethnic literature” is becoming “interethnic literature.” While ethnic American literatures still honor particular peoples' histories and traditions, the plots, characters, structures, and literary influences of post‐1980 ethnic fiction are compelled by an urge to encounter with others. Presenting interethnicity as paradigm and critical model, this book takes contemporary Asian American fiction as its case study. The Preface and Chapter 1 theorize interethnicity with ... More

This book argues that in the unprecedented globalizing, multi‐diasporic dynamics of our moment, what we have long thought of as “ethnic literature” is becoming “interethnic literature.” While ethnic American literatures still honor particular peoples' histories and traditions, the plots, characters, structures, and literary influences of post‐1980 ethnic fiction are compelled by an urge to encounter with others. Presenting interethnicity as paradigm and critical model, this book takes contemporary Asian American fiction as its case study. The Preface and Chapter 1 theorize interethnicity with reference to anthropological, postcolonial, and transnational theories of human migration and encounter; position this argument within the debates of Asian Americanist critique; and survey interethnic trends and tropes in a wide range of contemporary Asian American fiction. Three chapters present extended readings of interethnic experimentation in contemporary Asian American novels: Chapter 2 discusses the ambivalent relationship of Chang‐rae Lee's Native Speaker to African Americans, as well as to Koreanness, whiteness, and the multicultural, urban masses; Chapter 3 examines Gish Jen's elaboration of a transformational Chinese American identity in the heroine's conversion to Judaism in Mona in the Promised Land; and Chapter 4 argues that Karen Tei Yamashita demonstrates the convergence of interethnic and transnational imaginaries in a U.S.‐Mexico border region novel, Tropic of Orange. Two interchapters develop in‐between subjects: Asian American fiction's encounters with African Americans and their culture, and the cross‐ethnic writing of Jewishness in contemporary fictions by Asian Americans and others. The epilogue treats the historical development of mixed‐race characters in Asian American fiction.