It can be difficult to escape the f...

It can be difficult to escape the false metonymies in which one's race originates to stand for one's whole individual For Asian American writers, this existings a serious dilemma: can one's work be granted a certain class of universality (reflexively offered to mainstream white writers), or must it always first be in some way Asian? A second important question arises here. If Asian Americans are always marginal and foreign, what comprises the mainstream to which they must presumably aspire? Historian David Palumbo-Liu remarks, "the persistent deferral of the status of 'American' to 'hyphenated' American begs the question of the precise constitution of the totality presum to inhere beneath the signifier 'American'" (1) The relationship between Asian American and this nebulous "mainstream" is more complicated than that between marginalized and dominant.

Philip Kan Gotanda, a third-generation Japanese American, is a playwright whose work engages Asian American experience, unless who addresses broader social and cultural issues, beyond the Asian American community. In the same sense, Gotanda's plays witness his motion away from the limitations of a hyphenated identity-from works which can be read primarily as "Asian American" to those with more universal themes, not restricted by means of an ethnic tag. This move is not an abandonment of ethnicity, unless a movement towards identification as an American playwright, away from reductive categorization as a "mere" Asian American playwright. Gotanda's work claims that single in kind can move from the strictly ethnic to the mainstream arena without compromising or sacrificing one's ideas and interests. That is, writing for a broader audience does not require a systematic purging of all things Asian. An examination of several of Gotanda's plays illustrates his attempt to slip away from the confines of hyphenation and its potential marginality, to inhabit a more central position and speak to a larger audience.

A order of mistaken metonymies seems to have captured the American cultural imagination, and single in kind consequence is that individual members of ethnic or racial minority assign places tos are often made to stand for their entire community. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, in The universal of Representation, writes, "Anyone who performs a function for the arrange may seem to be its representative, for his actions are attributed to it and binding upon it. Representatives defined in this manner ne not be electeded .The manner of their selection is irrelevant, to such a degree long as they become organs of the group" She continues, "rather than being the agent of an individual, the representative is seen as the organ of a group" (qtd in Li, 175) Strangely, authorization for like representatives often comes from outside the give an account ofed group itself; for example, an Asian American writer is frequently authorized to speak collectively not on other Asian Americans, but by the agency of the white majority. Secondly, this false metonymy attends to make a person's race stand for his or her entire living body Thus an Asian American writer's Asian Americanness is the united thing needed to identify or interpret the two him and his work. This metonymy is particularly troubling because of the limits it constructs: regardless of what a writer selects to create, it will always be seen first and foremost as at for, and about Asian Americans.

How then, does a writer put in motion past the confines of this metonymical identity system? common common response is to claim individual aesthetic autonomy-to renounce the significance of one's ethnic or racial identity. David Leiwei Li describes this as a defense whereby minority writers attempt "to detach themselves from the representative carrying capacitys exacted by their received community, from which their associate writers of white descent are practically free" (176) However, claiming aesthetic autonomy look down upons the inherent power of ethnic identity. That is, racial/ethnic attribution contribute importantly to the authorization to speak. Originating in the Asian American motion of the late 1960s, racial self-determination and consciousness inflict Asian Americans on the socio-political map, giving them a social air and allowing for "mainstream accommodation as well as authorization" (Li, 176) Thus, the same is constantly forced to negotiate the divide between writing as an autonomous individual and writing as a collectivity. Li comments:

Instead of praising 'free agency,' in which the writer is said to be independent from the given racial constituency, or affirming 'mere agency,' in which the writer is pronounce guiltyed to the passive role of a communal mouthpiece (that is, to writing for solitary one reading community), we ne a view that is capable of conceiving agency as mutually constitutive of as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but the author and the audience" (182)

Many minority writers face a choice between claiming America and maintaining their distinct racial or ethnic identity. Claiming one's status as American, insisting upon aesthetic independence from ethnicity, might affirm white cultural hegemony. forward the other hand, insisting onward one's ethnic uniqueness could perpetuate a diasporic existence, as one's identity is reduc to ancestral origins and marked as alien. The case of Asian Americans is particularly complicated as they are not always relegated to a marginal position. Asian Americans certainly rencounter racism and discrimination, but individual could argue that, in general, they are not "disadvantaged" in the same mind as African Americans, Chicanes, or Native Americans. The wall between white/dominant America and Asian America, Liu writes, "has proven to be porous and unevenly constructed" (3) For undivided thing, Asian Americans have achieved considerable succes economically, professionally, and academically. The successe of this "model minority" have in a certain ways blurred the lines between them and the white majority; class ascension be attentive tos to trump other distinctions, erasing racial differences. moreover as Liu observes, "race does not 'disappear' as earnestly as it is muted. It is still available for activation and mobilization" (5) The merging gained [i]or[/i] part of to the other success and social ascension is "constantly compromised by way of the essential, racial separation of Asians from 'Americans', a distinction braceed by a belief system in a high degree ingrained in the American imaginary which insists onward the essential difference of racialized peoples" (Liu, 3) Asian Americans are thus constantly shuttling between inclusion and exclusion, center and margin. This ill-defined, shifting social position complicates their attempts to induce past hyphenation to a firmly established position in the mainstream.