Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (review)

Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003, xii + 215 pp. There be also other imaginations that rise in men, though waking, from the great impression made in sense: as from gazing upon the sun, the impression leaves an image of the sun before our eyes a long time after; and from being long and vehemently attent upon geometrical figures, a man shall in the dark, though awake, have the images of lines and angles before his eyes; which kind of fancy hath no particular name, as being a thing that doth not commonly fall into men's discourse. (Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 2) Next to my copy of Gilles Deleuze's On the Line lies Imagine Otherwise, invitingly open. The reviewer's personal taste may have something to do with this accident. An academic orientation and obligation too may explain this intertextual disorder coextensive to the transitory chaos of a Sunday afternoon. Yet the contiguity seems more telling than that. A certain force outside the books thus assembled and lined up: a Spirit of the Age, maybe. "To imagine otherwise is not about imagining as the other, but rather, is about imagining the other differently" (Chuh 9). The beauty of the opening formula is more than skin deep. As promised, the collection of four essays, insightfully contextualized by the preface, introduction and conclusion, shows how such adverbial thoughts on the forces of difference can, while retaining their critical agency and cogency, creatively reproduce themselves; without, that is, duplicating their inscribed marginality or parasiticity. Each essay rereads familiar conundrums, cases, and tropes, such as "Filipino America" (chapter 1),"Nikkei Internment" (chapter 2),"OneHundred Percent Korean" (chapter 3), and "(Dis)owning America" (chapter 4), while decoding and undoing the regulatory matrices of "Asian American" identity as an epistemological paradigm, constructed and reinforced historically and arti.cially, by the spatial logic of U.S. nationalism and the commodity logic of U.S.-led global capitalism. Such is the level of critical awareness and sophistication of this text which some readers of ethnic studies, used to anthropological reports, autobiographical narratives, or marketing manuals may find too theoretical, too distant or too strange. But something else indeed is happening. Imagine Otherwise exempli.es a generational shift and an evolution in Asian-American studies that began in the early 1980's, when the theoretical consciousness of modernity awakened or at least disturbed the pastoral and colonial slumber of the expansionist Humanities, including so-called regional studies that draws on the "natural" resources of "native," that is,"self-subalternized" informants (Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora [1993]). As a reflexive critique that "emphasizes a necessary reflectiveness of Asian American discourse upon itself (8-9)" and thus "calls for conceiving Asian American studies as a subjectless discourse" (9), Imagine Otherwise, a critical and self-critical discourse rather than an area study delimited by a subject matter, can be then read as post-Kantian; comparable, in its drive and viewpoint if not scope, to A Critique of Post-colonial Reason by Gaytari Spivak (1999), whose incisive deconstruction of identity-based difference Chuh borrows effectively and repeatedly as a point of departure (Chuh 9, 25-26, 28-29, 58, 75, 82, 145-147). …