UC Davis

This thesis revisits the work of Frank Chin to consider what it might mean for Asian American literary scholars to take seriously his investment in Confucianism. While previous critiques of Chin’s ideas emphasize the heteropatriarchal and masculinist dimensions of his cultural nationalism, I critically close read the religio-philosophical components of his arguments. I expand Patricia P. Chu’s schematization of Chin’s extinction, emasculation, and authenticity theses by taking a more diachronic view of his essayistic writings and by tracing the development of what I call his genre thesis and his religio-philosophical thesis. Through his religio-philosophical thesis, Chin eventually arrives in “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake” (1991) at an anti-Christian conceptualization of Confucianism that grounds a supposedly secular and universalist Asian American historiography, literary practice, and subjectivity. However, his construction of an areligious, universal Confucian subjectivity paradoxically replicates the religious call to profession which Max Weber characterizes as the heart of the capitalist work ethic and which Rey Chow describes as the mechanism by which capitalism subjugates ethnic subjects. I conclude by reading Chin against the grain in order to consider how his original notion of the “set” as a Confucian cultural form can provide an immanent critique of his reductive association of Edith Maude Eaton with authentic Asian American subjectivity. Reading Edith Maude Eaton’s “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909) in a literary set alongside Chin’s work and Confucian texts allows us to recognize how such a set presents a view of Asian American subjectivity that troubles the call to profession, authenticity, and universalism.