Gendered Reading Tactics: Public Intellectuals and Community in Diaspora [among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homeland], [Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i]

In this article, the author discusses two Asia-Pacific diasporic narratives of children of immigrants: Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homeland and Garrett Hongo's Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai'i, She explores how these two very different writers understand and constitute belonging, and how they negotiate the tensions between the projects of their individual lives and the complex communities of diaspora. * * * But isn't any autobiography... a desire to make a collective public image exist...? (Julia Kristeva, 1984, p. 220) There is a real fear in me, a real embodied fear of speaking up. There is also actual political censorship out there, and you have to put that on the table. memoir is not just a little middle-class narrative. It can be a very strong social-political instrument. (Shirley Geok-lin Lim, 1996a, p. 25) This essay examines a figure with clear modernist antecedents: the poet-pedagogue, part of a taxonomy of terms which attempt to capture the role and function of the public intellectual. I use it to characterize those writers who, for whatever reason, have projected onto them the burden of formulating and expressing a minority's cultural representations, metaphors, singularity, for the world at large. When the English poet Percy Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry, described poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world, he was to some extent harking back to an imagined golden era in the Greek polis when poet-pedagogues such as Plato were popularly believed to represent political life; in other words, that there was seamless continuity between politics, culture, and an ethical existence. Years later, William Butler Yeats, poet turned politician, invoked Shelley's phrase as a way of attempting to represent and give legitimacy to his role in the Irish nationalist movement at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. In this latter example in particular, critics have traced a clear continuity between such sentiments and a public and very interested version of nationalism (not to mention patriarchy). While cultural representations have in recent times often been analyzed as compromised culturalisms, functioning to camouflage dubious national (and increasingly global) political agendas, it might be time to rethink the question of how poet-pedagogues, a version of the public intellectual, function within conditions of diaspora.(1) reason for raising such an issue is that minority writers (poets and others) are often burdened with being seen as the spokespeople for their group; in other words, they have the double yoke of representation as delegation (in the political sense) and depiction (in the cultural sense). This paper forms part of an extended study exploring the theoretical and material concerns of minority groups attempting to survive amidst tensions precipitated by the contradictions in national, global and diasporic flows (Gunew, forthcoming). Diasporic studies have now become a hugely complicated field which overlaps with postcolonial and multicultural studies and, more recently, with attempts to theorize globalization and transnationalism. As Iain Chambers puts it, The chronicles of diasporas -- those of the black Atlantic, of metropolitan Jewry, of mass rural displacement -- constitute the groundswell of modernity (Chambers, p. 16). Taking its departure from the work of Bhabha, Chow and Hall in particular, this essay considers the ways in which autobiographies and memoirs function to construct models of belonging, the tactics employed in a diasporic context by minority groups whose cultural survival is constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by the master narratives of nationalism, globalism and even multiculturalism.(2) paper takes two diasporic case studies: two memoirs, written by a male and female poet respectively, situated in that increasingly influential organizing term, Asian-American writing. …

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