"Literature
does not
just reflect reality;
it is a place
where power
relations are elaborately
staged and
social contradictions are worked out.
The study of
literature can therefore serve
as a form of political
diagnosis."
Colleen Lye
By using an interdisciplinary framework to analyze Asian representation in American literature, Colleen Lye, an assistant professor of English, finds that a certain genre is linked in important ways to Asian-American identity and the post-1960s stereotype of a "model minority." That genre, known as naturalism, is known mainly for its critique of capitalist injustices, but Lye focuses instead on its portrayal of Asia and Asian immigrants.
She is at work on a book that examines how various authors portray Asia and Asians within their critiques of capitalist injustice. In Jack London's Manchuria of the Russo-Japanese War, Frank Norris's Baja Mexico, Pearl S. Buck's Northern China, and John Steinbeck's California, Lye sees details that help tell the story of Asian exclusion and shape Asian-American identity. She makes an original connection between this genre and Asian-American studies, and by doing so, she clearly demonstrates the value of revisiting old texts from different perspectives and scrutinizing the contexts in which they were written.
The MacArthur Foundation Program in International Peace and Security recognized the broad reach and relevance of Lye's work and in 1995 awarded her its two-year Social Science Research Council fellowship, an award that typically goes to political scientists, not literary scholars.
"Being the only humanist in the program that year, I found myself in a lot of interesting conversations with social scientists about what literary studies have to offer to understanding problems in the real world," Lye recalls. "Literature does not just reflect reality; it is a place where power relations are elaborately staged and social contradictions are worked out. The study of literature can therefore serve as a form of political diagnosis. I gained an added appreciation for the importance of having an impact through my scholarship, and to speaking to people outside my discipline and beyond academia."
In that vein, Lye is contributing to an anthology of essays about U.S. campaign finance reform and the Asian donor scandal in Washington, D.C., which analyzes the scapegoating of Asian Democratic Party fundraisers.
Asians in
19th-century
America
were
depicted as
a threat to
American
workers.
See reference page
A first-generation Asian American whose family immigrated from Singapore when she was 10, Lye received her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University. She used the MacArthur Foundation grant to return to Berkeley, where she had been an undergraduate, to conduct historical research at The Bancroft Library. She joined Berkeley's English faculty in 1997.
"The kernel for my research project was incubated in my undergraduate experience at Berkeley, in terms of asking, What is an Asian American? What is the origin of the model-minority stereotype?," she recalls, explaining that as a student journalist she helped break stories that led to widespread discussion about the university's admissions policies toward Asian Americans. "Asian Americans were seen as non-whites, on the one hand, and yet on another, sort of proof of the non-necessity of affirmative action."
Lye's forthcoming book, Model Modernity: The Making of Asiatic Racial Form, 1882-1945, concentrates on a period when immigrants of Asian origin were classified as "aliens ineligible to citizenship." The years are marked by the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to the end of World War II, when the act was overturned.
Literary naturalism -- a literature of social protest that arose during this period -- is well known for criticizing big-business interests and dramatizing the plight of the working class. What has not been recognized is the relationship between those texts, which informed and fueled populist reform movements, and policies toward people of Asian descent. Lye traces how the push for Asian exclusion ironically arose out of these liberal movements due to the perceived threat that Chinese laborers and Japanese farmers posed to American workers. "I'm not interested in just slamming these writers for Asian exclusionist sentiments or in extolling them for their social radicalism; I'm interested in how it is possible that these two things can go together," she says.
Her book also explores why and how it is that Asians have been portrayed as both antithetical to Western culture ("the yellow peril") and exemplary of its universality ("the model minority"). Lye draws a connection between the "yellow peril" sentiment of the past and modern-day rhetoric about "overrepresentation" of Asians at the nation's top universities. She also writes that the praise directed at Asian Americans today for their achievements echoes the praise aimed at Chinese and Japanese immigrants during the period of Asian exclusion, when they were portrayed as hard-working and entrepreneurial. In both periods of time, she argues, those compliments bolster stereotypes and carry an undertone of a perceived economic threat. "The terms by which they're praised are the terms by which they're condemned," she says.
Through her work in and beyond the literary realm, Lye makes unique contributions to the dialogue around several areas of scholarly interest, including Orientalism, postcolonial theory, and Asian-American historiography. In the process, she says, she hopes to sort out and help clarify some of the enduring puzzles of U.S.-Asian relations, as well as the issues of race and class that have profoundly influenced that relationship through time.