Being Asian American in "Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the US, Canada and Australia"
In looking into the similarities between Asian Americans and Asian Australians, I came across this book “Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the US, Canada and Australia” by Timothy Yu. I was curious to see what connections and differences he saw in culture generation in these countries. What does the term “Asian American” mean? When the term “Asian American” was first used, it was during the civil rights movement in the late 60s-70s to unite activists of Asian descent behind a common political banner. It became over time, however, quite a “unitary identity” that was homogenous, and essentialized. As Lisa Lowe wrote, Asian American cultural nationalism became a reproduction of US nationalism, and ignored the variation in the material realities of Asian Americans. After that Asian Americanists/studies people began to acknowledge that, for example, not everyone was from China or Japan but from all over Asia and South East Asia, and could not be assumed to have any intrinsic similarities