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MADISON JOURNAL OF LITERARY CRITICISM
and racially marked Asians as ‘foreign’ to the national polity.”11 The Asian American subject becomes a subjective quagmire that renders assimilation both possible and impossible. Lowe argues that it is precisely this anxiety toward the “foreigner-within” that “has given rise to the necessity of endlessly fixing and repeating such stereotypes.”12 The national public consciousness clings to images such as the effeminate Asian American man or the submissive Asian American female in order to, on an ontological level, incorporate a stable and nonthreatening identity into the regulated symbolic order of the U.S. national imagination. It is a reification process that has persisted throughout American history and has been the focus of numerous recuperation projects, including Chin’s desire to hypermasculinize the Asian American man. As Asian American literary studies realize the limitations of what inclusion in the national polity has to offer, the focus has shifted. In a ghostly manner, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (written in 197513) anticipates the literary strategies of contemporary authors who seek to articulate an Asian America beyond the space and time of the nation-state; the turn to the diasporic formation in the canon must also include Kingston. The Woman Warrior is a text that internally complicates the delineations of family and nation and externally challenges the reprosexuality of canonicity. My analysis thus consists of these three different but interconnected frameworks of examination: family, nation, and canon. In this manner, my examination of narrative in The Woman Warrior reinforces how I position Kingston within the Asian American canon. First, I look at the structure of family in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and how recuperative discursive acts bring lost historical figures into the family narrative. These acts regulate the compulsory heterosexuality and sexual suppression necessary to maintain familial alliance. Second, the delineation of family, sealed by the historical family narrative, resembles the delineation of citizenship managed by a history of state-operated apparatuses. Third, I examine the Asian American literary canon as an epistemological configuration. It relies on the linear and generational logics that bind family and nation. As a result, the institutionalization of familial structures enforces epistemic violence. 11 Ibid., 8. 12 Ibid., 19. 13 Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (New
York: Vintage, 1977).