Beyond Ethnic Whiteness

This article explores the political possibilities in the “morphing” of Asian American identity from an excluded racial category into an assimilable ethnicity by turning to Gish Jen’s second novel, Mona in the Promised Land ( Mona ). In contrast to Asian American studies’ more common radical accounts, Mona elevates upper-middle-class Jewishness, the paradigmatic white ethnic identity, by placing it at the center of Asian American identity. In doing so, I argue that Mona ’s bildungsroman form pushes the identification of Asian American as the “New Jews” beyond its reification in model minority discourse toward a rediscovery of diasporic consciousness. Specifically, through a recursive narrative logic that combines the marriage plot and the mother-daughter romance via Asian ethnic and Jewish romantic suitors as Mona ’s objects of desire, the novel rediscovers a diasporic consciousness that extends the social and political horizon of ethnicized Asian American identity beyond nation-states (both US and Asian nationals) and toward a geopolitical order rooted in counter-discourses and Jewish traditions of exile. Of course, this exilic foundation to Asian American ethnicity offers no political guarantees. It does, however, disrupt the presumption that the morphing of race into ethnicity for Asian American identity necessarily leads to the reproduction of white hegemony

Asian americans · Ethnic group · History of Asian Americans · Narrative · Political subjectivity · Politics · Reification (Marxism) · Subjectivity · White (mutation) · American Jewish Fiction Analysis · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity