Department of English

Yogita Goyal, "Introduction: The Transnational Turn," in the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, ed. Yogita Goyal, 1–17 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

During the twentieth century, state health authorities in California recommended sterilization for over 20,000 individuals held in state institutions. Asian immigrants occupied a marginalized position in racial, gender, and class hierarchies in California at the height of its eugenic sterilization program. Scholars have documented the disproportionate sterilization of other racialized groups, but little research exists connecting the racist, gendered implementation of Asian immigration restriction to the racism and sexism inherent in eugenics. This study examines patterns of coercive sterilization in Asian immigrants in California, hypothesizing higher institutionalization and sterilization rates among Asian-born compared with other foreign- and US-born individuals. We used complete count census microdata from 1910 to 1940 and digitized sterilization recommendation forms from 1920 to 1945 to model relative institutionalization and sterilization rates of Asian-born, other foreign-born, and US-born populations, stratified by gender. Other foreign-born men and women had the highest institutionalization rates in all four census years. Sterilization rates were higher for Asian-born women compared with US-born [Incidence Rate Ratio (IRR) = 2.00 (95% CI: 1.61, 2.48)] and other foreign-born women (p < 0.001) across the entire study period. Sterilization rates for Asian-born men were not significantly higher than those of US-born men [IRR 0.95 (95% CI 0.83, 1.10). However, an inflection point model incorporating the year of sterilization found higher sterilization rates for Asian-born men than for US-born men prior to 1933 [IRR 1.31 (95% CI 1.09, 1.59)]. This original quantitative analysis contributes to the literature demonstrating the health impact of discrimination on Asian-Americans and the disproportionate sterilization of racial minorities under state eugenics programs.

This article extends the terms of debate in Western feminism by analyzing the gender politics within Asian American cultural studies. On account of historical "emasculation" of Asian American men (exclusion laws, labor restrictions, cultural stereotyping, etc), Chinese American male writers feel the need to reassert manhood through heroic literary portrayal. I urge these writers to recover a cultural space without denigrating the "feminine" and to redefine heroism by transcending binaries.

This article interprets Kingston's China Men as "historiographic metafiction"--a revisionist novel which counters traditional historiography with an alternative mode of telling and reimagines the past to make room for a different future. Kingston's "talk story" technique allows her, by inter­ weaving oral and literary traditions and a polyphonic multiplicity of narratives, to fracture and subvert both Chinese patriarchal and white American authority. Like Foucault's genealogy, talk-story · thus "fragments what was thought unified" by decentering, disseminating and interrogating authority. But Kingston embellishes historical data and received myths with imagined details; she mixes fact and fantasy to herald a world grounded in reciprocity rather than domination.

This article combines legal, sociological, and literary scholarship. Taking the lead from scholars of Critical Race Theory who have shown how African Americans and Korean Americans were positioned agonistically in People v. Soon Ja Du and in the media accounts about the LA uprising, I submit that “The Court Interpreter” by Ty Pak at once impugns and underwrites the oppositional racial identities dictated by the “master narrative.” Part III opens with Cheung’s interracial analysis of what she describes as “(mis)interpretations and (in)justice” during the 1992 Los Angeles “Riots” and “Black-Korean Conflict” (2005). Here, Cheung draws on fictional and legal material where racial issues are interpreted and misinterpreted within the context of a highly charged racialized climate in 1992 on the heels of the verdict that exonerated four white policemen captured on video as brutally beating Rodney King.

This essay assesses the acrimonious debates about Holocaust memory that took place in Germany in 2020–2021 and that have come to be known as Historikerstreit 2.0. These debates call up older controversies, especially the 1986 Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) in which Jürgen Habermas took on conservative historians who sought to relativize the Nazi genocide. The Historikerstreit concerned the relation between Nazi and Stalinist crimes and the question of German responsibility for the Holocaust; today’s controversies involve instead the relation between colonialism and the Holocaust and racism and antisemitism as well as the ongoing crisis in Israel/Palestine. As the current debates reveal, the dominant Holocaust memory regime in Germany is based on an absolutist understanding of the Holocaust’s uniqueness and a rejection of multidirectional approaches to the genocide. While that memory regime represented a major societal accomplishment of the 1980s and 1990s, it has reached its limits in Germany’s “postmigrant” present. Yet, as an example of migrant engagement with the Holocaust illustrates, German society already includes alternative practices of memory that could transform the German model of coming to terms with the past in productive ways.