I just wanted to deal a little bit with something that's been in the back of my mind this semester basically from day 1: the problems associated with defining who and what comprises the Asian American community, something I don't feel like we really dealt with in class. Although we read texts by authors who were/are east Asian, south Asian, southeast Asian, Philippina, hapa, and in the case of some of the spoken word, Palestinian, to the best of my knowledge there's little consensus about whether all of these groups are/should be included in the blanket term "Asian American." Putting these authors' work into an intro to Asian American lit amounts to, in this context, a political decision by Prof Suh that we all sort of implicitly accepted over the course of the class. I'm not prepared to argue for the inclusion or exclusion of any particular group as Asian American (although I would be elated to see a reading of mixed-ethnicity authors from a variety of backgrounds with an eye toward commonalities, but that's just being selfish), but I do think we need to unpack what we really mean when we talk about the Asian American community.

This runs parallel in my mind, actually, to the idea we talked about on the first day of class, that the texts we read were all in some sense non-canonical Asian American lit. Just from the authorship/content of the works we read, this canonicity of texts seems to dovetail with the identities of their authors. We read a lot of texts written by members of groups marginalized in most Asian American discourse: queer authors, mixed-race authors, children of working-class immigrants (marginalized because a lot of post-1965 immigration has been of the 'brain drain' variety), and the majority of the authors we read were(/are) women (though I'm not prepared to critically examine whether or not women's authorship is marginalized in Asian American lit, since the canon does include Amy Tan and "Woman Warrior"). Does the marginalization of the author lead to marginalization of their text?

I don't think there are any easy answers to these issues, but it's definitely hard to talk about Asian American studies as a field without at the least problematizing the boundaries of the Asian American community as it is commonly understood.

Thanks everyone for an interesting and enjoyable semester! I'll keep up my daily-life blog when I work abroad next year, so hopefully we can stay in touch.