This essay considers how a transnational feminist literary practice, one that proceeds through the modality of rereading and rewriting, opens up the meaning and possibilities for the right to self-determination, against and beyond the settler state sovereignty into which it has hardened. It examines the 1995 short story “My Elizabeth,” by the Arab American writer Diana Abu-Jaber, as an unexpected source of political theory, which rewrites self-determination from the perspective of occupied peoples—namely, Native peoples in the United States and Palestinians—subject to ongoing settler colonialism. Abu-Jaber’s portrait of intimacies between subjects “in transit” imagines how “radical futures past” become the source of alternate affective and political communities in the present.

Abstract This essay reviews three books—Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (2018), and the essay collection, edited by JoEllen DeLucia and Juliet Shields, Migration and Modernities: The State of Being Stateless, 1750–1850 (2019). Examples of a growing concern in the humanities and cultural studies with “the geopolitics of migration,” these books share an interest as to how the transposition of the sovereign state across the globe not only regularizes citizenship, territoriality, and rights discourses, but also makes the stateless—and the “rightlessness” marking those who are stateless—a permanent, constitutive feature of global modernity. Engaging political theory as well as political history, they consider exiles and refugees not as incidental to the political and legal institutions of modernity, but as critically illuminating of them. In particular, this review essay focuses on how, in the authors’ accounts, varied conceptions of the relations among law, politics, cultural difference, and social formations shape the possibility of political thinking.

This chapter considers the hemisphere as a geopolitical heuristic for Asian American literature. While the era of 1965 to 1996 is considered pivotal for new growth in Asian American populations in the United States because of liberal reforms in immigration policy, it was also one in which the expansion of the global Cold War led US power to brutally target newly decolonized and revolutionary societies in its fight against Communism. This chapter examines how diasporic Asian literatures from the period illuminate the mechanisms of “development” from the Cold War to the neoliberal, postsocialist present. Beyond registering the presence of Asians in the Americas since the sixteenth century, the chapter argues that various “hemispheric imaginings” grapple with the disavowed operations of political violence by which Latin American and Asian nations were “transitioned” from a region of nonaligned, postcolonial republics to capitalist states ruled by comprador and transnational elites. At the same time, a hemispheric imaginary provides a method for reading artists’ visions of alternate, shared futures and South–South, transracial solidarities that continue to haunt the postcolonial world.

Reviewed by: The Novel of Human Rights by James Dawes Crystal Parikh (bio) James Dawes, The Novel of Human Rights (Harvard University Press, 2018), ISBN 978-0-674-98644-2, 232 pages. On the day that I began writing this review, the mercurial president of the United States announced, by way of social media, two abrupt shifts on policy decisions that held grave implications for thousands of people: a temporary delay on the mass raids of undocumented immigrant families by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in the United States and a hold on retaliatory airstrikes [End Page 258] against the nation of Iran for its attack on a US military drone.1 It would seem the American public, and possibly the rest of the world, has acclimated itself to the "new normal" of such dramatic swings, awaiting the next Twitter storm of abuse and outrage as the executive branch of the US government continues to rule with impunity garnered by way of its centralization of power, a process begun decades before the current administration came into office. Against such madefor-television spectacles created by the commercial news-entertainment complex and fed by the vast machinery of social media and other digital networks, the idea of human rights has never seemed more like a fiction. To even the most casual of observers, the proposition that every human being everywhere has an inherent claim to certain freedoms and protections seems to be countermanded at every turn. Perhaps it is precisely under such dire conditions that we should take fiction itself as a serious object of study, as James Dawes does in his recently published monograph, The Novel of Human Rights.2 Opening with the proposition that "we are, for the first time, living in a popular culture of human rights"—one whose success has in turn "helped trigger a frightened, revanchist ethnonationalism"—Dawes illuminates the way in which prose fiction in the United States has shaped our common-sense understandings of human rights while rights norms have embedded themselves as formal features and thematic concerns in the contemporary American novel.3 Throughout The Novel of Human Rights, Dawes identifies and elaborates "centers of aesthetic gravity" across a range of late twentieth and current twenty-first century novels not only to argue that such a genre might be said to exist, but also to provide "aesthetic and conceptual depth to our readings" of these texts.4 The conclusions at which Dawes arrives by the end of his study—that "the novel of human rights is defined by aesthetic contradictions and wrenching moral paradoxes"5—speak directly to the significance of studying the intersection of human rights and literary fiction in the current moment. This is not so much a project of defending the viability of human rights politics and practice on the ground or of prescribing the proper forms for the representation of violence and suffering in literature. Rather, it is one that examines how the material conditions and political realities of our current conjuncture set the terms for both representation and response in our cultural politics, and it also examines how the contradictions and unruliness of those structures offer up the possibility for moving forms of dissensus and transformation. Thus, by the end of the book, Dawes describes himself as "untroubled by the problem of compossibility, the mess of language, and the sometimes bewildering and conflictual plenitude of our imagination and [End Page 259] ideals," seeing the "contradictions and anxieties" in the texts he has surveyed instead as "a sign of human rights' vitality of thought rather than its philosophical or political implausibility."6 Dawes arrives at his ultimate embrace of dissensus and irresolution by charting in his first three chapters those recurring features whose appearances define the genre of the human rights novel. These include (in Chapter One)7 the distinction between the "justice plot" and the "escape plot";8 (in Chapter Two)9 the crucial tropes, motifs, and themes of privacy, homes, secrecy, movement, and family (particularly lost children and orphans) that correspond to the relations that human rights mediate between states and individual persons; and (in Chapter Three)10 the often problematic use of allegory and empathy as vehicles...

Asian American literature and art have had an illuminating effect on the significance of human rights in the United States and in national culture. Americans are often assumed to enjoy exceptional liberties and rights, which they seek in turn to deliver to other people, in other parts of the world. However, Asian American cultural critique provides an incisive perspective on the limits of citizenship and national belonging as the basis for the granting of fundamental human freedoms, rights, and protections to all persons. The legal exclusion of Asians from immigration and naturalization, as well as from other forms of social and economic security such as property ownership, has long been justified through the construction of Asian racial difference. Reforms in immigration law after World War II, which did eventually transform Asian American life in the United States, took place in the context of a “global Cold War,” and during the same period that saw the institution of an international human rights regime. “Integration” proved as essential a mandate in US domestic and foreign policy as did “containment” in this global conflict. As a result, not only has the Asian American population grown significantly and become more heterogeneous since the late 20th century, the nation has seen the flourishing of Asian American literary and cultural production. Asian American writers and artists have been especially keen to investigate the political, legal, and ideological tensions and contradictions that pervade the postsocialist world and the war on terror. Their works explore the political precarity faced by those caught between the contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism, the logics and technologies of state security, and the legal tethering of human rights to citizenship.

Reviewed by: Southwest Asia: The Transpacific Geographies of Chicana/o Literature by Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue Crystal Parikh Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue, Southwest Asia: The Transpacific Geographies of Chicana/o Literature. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2016. 196 pp. Cloth, $80; paper, $28.95; e-book, $26.95. As comparative, transnational, and transracial approaches become increasingly prevalent in American studies, myriad new insights about racial formations, cultural politics, and national belonging [End Page 223] have been made possible for reading across long-entrenched borders. Scholarship that puts Asian American and Latina/o cultural production and representational politics into such critical conversation, while not quite as prominent as other areas of such comparative studies, offers much promise in this direction. Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue's Southwest Asia: The Transpacific Geographies of Chicana/o Literature contributes in a new and fascinating way to this growing body of work. Taking up a number of well-known Chicana/o authors—mostly men and many of those writing in one way or another about men's experiences of war—Gonzales Sae-Saue evinces the construction of Asia, Asians, and Asian Americans in this literature, persuasively arguing that the Asian presence provokes and inspires Chicana/o oppositional politics and cultural nationalism by way of a dynamic interplay between local and internationalist identifications. As he demonstrates, the presence of Asia and Asians is a "consistent yet marginal" one in Chicana/o literature: the regular yet peripheral appearances of Asia and Asians in Chicana/o writings not only highlight a pattern of ethnicity-based forms of political emergence, but also gesture toward extra-literary matters of transnational inspiration across distinct Pacific Rim crises that are hardly recognizable within any given text's representative architecture. (5) Rather than posing this revelation as the occasion of straightforward (and too easy) subaltern affiliations and solidarity across racial, national, and ethnic difference, however, Gonzales Sae-Saue discerns a consistent conflation of Chicano and Asian spaces, or the production of a "Southwest Asia," that registers much more ambivalent and contradictory impulses on the part of Chicana/o writers and artists. Southwest Asia thus maintains that the Asian presence in Chicana/o literary and cultural production points both to the movement's forceful renunciation of US imperial violence as well as its continual subordination of Asian others to its own racial and national interests. Gonzales Sae-Saue begins with the well-known 1959 novel by José Antonio Villarreal, Pocho, and ends with Virginia Grise's 2011 [End Page 224] play rasgos asiáticos (Asian Traces) but also returns in his coda to the heyday of Chicana/o nationalist politics with the founding of the first national journal of Chicana/o studies, El Grito, in 1967. He includes readings of works by notable—effectively canonical—writers such as Luis Valdez, Américo Paredes, and Rudolfo Anaya. This particular archive proves essential for bearing out the book's claim that the seemingly marginal Asian presence has been central in the production of the social and political values that distinguish Chicana/o political culture. Southwest Asia also proceeds by way of a gendered analytics, drawing especially on Chicana feminism to elucidate where anti-imperialist politics nevertheless depend upon heteropatriarchal norms to consolidate the resistant subjects of Chicano nationalisms. The treatment of Asia and Asian racial difference that originates in Chicana/o literary studies is, as I have indicated, a very welcome comparative intervention in borderland studies. But it also incites a wish that Gonzales Sae-Saue had more thoroughly engaged with the scholarship in Asian American literary and cultural studies, which has created much new and rich awareness regarding national culture, especially with respect to the themes of integration, ambivalence, and dissent that preoccupy Southwest Asia. While in the book's coda Gonzales Sae-Saue thoughtfully reflects on the disciplinary and institutional constraints that had until recently led Chicana/o studies "to establish intellectual and ethnic boundaries around its interests in order to validate its demands for an academic space controlled entirely by Chicana/o students and faculty, all to the exclusion of its interracial and trans-national orientations," the preceding chapters do not provide the same kind of sustained conversation with Asian American studies that one might...

On the Road Again with the American Girl Crystal Parikh (bio) The vocal trends of young women and girls, such as "vocal fry," "uptalk," slang and conversational fillers such as "like" and "um," are often taken as signs of their insecurity or the insignificance of the content of their speech. However, some scholars have suggested that in fact these linguistic features are sophisticated mechanisms for negotiating social interactions, possibly as cues and tools in building relationships with others through language. Girl culture has proven a kind of "incubator" for vocal stylings that spread across other divisions to older generations and to men; young women are, in short, linguistic innovators. I was reminded of this phenomenon and the media coverage it has briefly received when I was asked to revisit the question of transnational feminism in American literature in the "moment of Trump." The consistency with which young women go overlooked or written off as political subjects and creative agents comes as no huge surprise to anyone who pays even glancing attention to national culture and nationalist discourses. The protection of girls and young women has served as the alibi for all sorts of disciplinary measures, ranging from laws requiring parental notification and consent for a minor's abortion, the policing of bathrooms through statutes that target transgender persons, and stepped up deportations and [End Page 491] anti-immigrant policies in the aftermath of Kathryn Steinle's death in the "sanctuary city" of San Francisco (Steinle was struck and killed by a wayward bullet shot by an undocumented immigrant in July 2015). And, of course, Donald Trump himself was even momentarily disavowed—upon disclosure of his infamously misogynistic remarks—by the likes of Paul Ryan and John Kasich, who cited their revulsion as fathers and husbands to Trump's cavalier description of sexual assault. On the other hand, it seems routinely inconceivable to elected officials, media and corporate elite, and even most artists and scholars that girls and young women might in themselves be anything besides (potential) victims, mindless consumers, or apathetic observers with regards to the weightier matters that constitute public life. In contrast, I contend, transnational feminism instructs us to look beyond such limited representations to see American girls and women as, in Wai Chee Dimock's terms "hitherto unpromising players" who "suddenly prove themselves capable of feats no one would have suspected" (2017, 44). There is also another side to the story of the current political moment that ought not to be forgotten when speaking of American women's political participation, at least in the electoral process. Namely, there exists an acute division within the US female electorate that falls sharply along racial and ethnic lines, with 52% of white women voting for Donald Trump, while Hilary Clinton struggled even to win over a majority of college-educated white women, barely squeaking out with 51% of that particular demographic. Meanwhile, although their identification with Clinton would seem less easily made, women of color consistently voted against Trump, with an especially remarkable 93% of black women voting for the Democratic candidate. As any number of observers noted in the election's aftermath, Clinton didn't lose women; she lost white women. Trump's victory, alongside that of Republicans in both houses of Congress, certainly has stark implications for women across the globe. Most immediately, for example, one of the first (and few) successful policy maneuvers on the part of the Trump administration was to reinstate the "global gag" rule, thereby prohibiting nongovernmental organizations that receive funds from the United States to provide information, counseling, or referrals for abortions in the services they provide women outside the United States. Meanwhile, conservative news outlets and memes continue to fetishize the oppression that women in other parts of the world, especially those living in Islamic and Muslim societies, face, thereby upholding an [End Page 492] image of the United States as somehow exceptional in the rights and freedoms it grants women. We should not, however, let the sheer outlandish buffoonery and the starkly retrograde aspirations of the current administration distract us from the fact that a Clinton administration, like the Obama one, would have continued to preside over an American empire, one...

Early in Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Lê’s firstperson six-year-old narrator finds herself in communion with the glass animals locked in a display case in the office of the Russell family, which sponsors her, her father, and four other men—“the uncles”—who accompanied them as they fled from Vietnam to the United States. She tells the animals about her journey on the boat and rescue at sea by the U.S. Navy, memories of her mother from whom she and her father have been (temporarily) separated, and about her dreams in which her family is reunited. Ultimately, she smashes the display cabinet, hurling a glass disk containing a motionless butterfly whose captivity has fascinated and troubled her:

The Introduction of Writing Human Rights provides a historical overview of the international and domestic postwar contexts in which an international human rights regime was established, as it distinguishes human rights from liberal humanitarianism. It focuses on Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a watershed novel for theorizing human rights at the end of the “American century.”

Reviewed by: Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India by Asha Nadkarni Crystal Parikh (bio) Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India, by Asha Nadkarni. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 264pp. $25.00 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8166-8993-4. As a conceptual framework and theoretical approach, transnational feminism has provided Asian American studies a welcome method by which to complicate any number of critical givens in the field: who counts as its subjects, what spaces fall under its purview, how social formations come into existence and how transformations in them take place, and how to rethink what we understand to be political resistance, subjection, and agency. And yet, like so many such critical discursive concepts, on its own and without being anchored in the particular histories and lifeworlds of women, transnational feminism is a rubric that can feel slippery and abstract, despite its very aim to the contrary. In other words, as a rejoinder to liberal feminism, a transnational feminist methodology cautions against positing any simplification and homogenization of women and women’s experience. The best of transnational feminist scholarship thus makes border crossings with great care, attentive to the specificities that render “woman” unviable as a singular, monolithic category of identity, but able to deploy gender and sexuality as powerful analytics for culture and society nonetheless. In her 2014 monograph, Eugenic Feminism: Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India, Asha Nadkarni accomplishes this task with precision and clarity, and it is a book that makes important contributions to a number of fields beyond Asian American studies, including transnational American literary and cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, South Asian diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies. Nadkarni demonstrates how, in its both positive and negative aspects, what she calls “eugenic feminism” comes to center on modern national development and the reproduction of national populations, which hence become the object of intensely regulated social and political cultivation. [End Page 132] Building on the work of feminist critics who have demonstrated the extent to which Anglo-American feminisms mobilized racial and class differences, Nadkarni considers American feminist discourses—and reactionary responses to them by those such as Katherine Mayo—in relation to Indian nationalist feminism. She argues that both movements “launch their claims to feminist citizenship based on modernist constructions of the reproductive body as the origin of the nation” and shows that, by locating biological reproduction as the key to both national progress and women’s rights, eugenic feminisms in the United States and in India take reproductive practices as central to women’s citizenship in each nation (5). Nadkarni further describes a “maternalist feminism” that homes in on women’s reproductive capacities as the locus for generating social and political agency (i.e., women as having “choice”) and implementing national(ist) objectives. Eugenic Feminism begins with the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the late nineteenth century and ends with the period of Emergency Rule under Indira Gandhi in the 1970s, with an epilogue that turns to current transnational reproductive technologies and market in the twenty-first century to consider how eugenics morphs into population control over the course of the twentieth century. In relating eugenics and population control (while also distinguishing the affective and political dimensions of each) by way of transnational analysis, Nadkarni further considers the global implications for “fit” and “unfit” forms of life as construed through imperial and postcolonial imaginaries of racial, gender, religious, and class difference. By way of Asian Americanist and transnational feminist perspectives, Nadkarni supplements postcolonial feminist studies that tend to focus upon either imperial feminist politics or patriarchal nationalism. As her discussions of the poet and activist Sarojini Naidu in chapters 2 and 3 and of Indira Gandhi in chapter 5 demonstrate, Indian feminism was itself quite active in producing visions of the nation and programs for its future (albeit neither of these women willingly adopted the moniker of “feminist”). On the other hand, Nadkarni’s analyses of Gilman and Mayo illustrate how the anxiety-ridden representations of Asia and “Mother India” bear upon conceptions of American national health, American women’s social and religious practices, and U.S. imperial ventures, immigration, and cultural...

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The Conclusion describes how the construction of the child as a human rights subject in the Convention on the Rights of the Child insists upon a human right to family, which in turn animates an “aesthetics of kin” in minor literatures, such as Aimeee Phan’s short story collection We Should Never Meet.

1. Asian American literature within and beyond the immigrant narrative Min Hyoung Song 2. America's empire and the Asia-Pacific: constructing Hawaii and the Philippines Denise Cruz and Erin Suzuki 3. Adjudicating Asian America Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimikawa 4. Writing the internment Greg Robinson 5. The literature of the Korean War and Vietnam War Daniel Y. Kim and Viet Thanh Nguyen 6. The war on terror: post 9/11 South Asian and Arab American literature Rajini Srikanth 7. Asian American drama Josephine Lee 8. Asian American poetry Josephine Park 9. Model minority narratives and the Asian American family Erin Ninh 10. The writing of translation Christopher Lee 11. Popular genres and new media Betsy Huang 12. Towards a definition of diaspora literature Hyungji Park 13. Feminisms and queer interventions into Asian America Helena Grice and Crystal Parikh 14. Comparative race studies and interracialisms Joseph Keith 15. Rethinking embodiment and hybridity: mixed race, adoptee and disabled subjectivities Cathy Schlund-Vials and Cynthia Wu.