Politics of the Literary: Reading Form in Gary Pak's A Ricepaper Airplane

Abstract

Ethnic/cultural nationalism has been a crucial source of coalition building and of forming empowering collectives for Asian Americans. In its identification of race as the central axis around which social relations are organized, it sought to claim a legitimate space for Asian Americans in the U.S. national space. While ethinic/cultural nationalism was a significant channel for change, it was complemented by and further led to a highly restrictive configuration of Asian American literature. Asian American literature was defined as literary works that forcibly and effectively addressed the specific contradictions faced by Asian Americans as racial minorities living in a racist state. However, recently, as a result of the increasing diversity in Asian American populations in the U.S. and increasing literary productions by Asian Americans, several scholars have articulated the need to move beyond the thematic and sociological approaches to literary works, to which ethnic/cultural nationalism gave rise. In this paper, I thus concentrate on the formal features of a novel by a writer of Korean descent based in Hawaii, Gary Pak's A Ricepaper Airplane. In focusing on the "formal," I do not by no means suggest that form need be privileged over content, but that it is through the formal innovations of his novel that Pak engages in his ideological critique. I examine how Pak's mode of narration, his use of multiple voices, abrupt time-shifts, disruption of linear time and space can be read as his attempt to inscribe the experience of a victimized immigrant subject into history. For instance, the significance of pidgin lies not solely in its presence. But because of its radical difference from other discourses in the novel, it is able to expose the self-consciousness and self-interestedness of structures of knowledge that undergird other voices. Moreover, I consider how Pak revises the terms of the U.S. nationalist narrative that reads immigration in a logic of linear development, as a progressive movement into modernity. In this regard, I argue that the formal innovations of Pak's novel is an engagement with and reaction to the social structures attendant with modernity, and that Pak schematizes immigration to the U.S. as constitutive of modernity in Korea and American modernity.