Nine years ago, when Long Le-Khac was a newly minted Ph.D., he hit a research roadbump. He’d planned to use data analytics to map the various settings featured in Asian American literature, testing a hypothesis that this fictive geography had become increasingly international. But first, the computer would need answers from him: Of all the literary works in the world, which ones should it include as “Asian American” in its analysis?
That roadbump forced Le-Khac, now an assistant professor in Berkeley’s ethnic studies department, to confront a more existential query: What does calling something “Asian American” mean? Who or what is included under that umbrella?
Wrestling with that definition, Le-Khac said, was a “digression that increasingly got bigger and bigger and richer and more interesting to me.”
Nearly a decade later, it has resulted in a recently published, 1,900-entry long database of the Asian American literary canon, which he hopes will allow other scholars to dig into these thorny issues.