Double Agency
Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture
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by Tina Chen
Stanford University Press
Due/Published
September 2005, 280 pages,
paper
ISBN
0804751862
In Double Agency, Tina Chen proposes impersonation as a paradigm for teasing out the performative dimensions of Asian American literature and culture. Asian American acts of impersonation, she argues, foreground the limits of subjectivity even as they insist on the undeniable importance of subjecthood. By decoupling imposture from impersonation, Chen shows how Asian American performances have often been misinterpreted, read as acts of betrayal rather than multiple allegiance. A central paradox informing the book--impersonation as a performance of divided allegiance that simultaneously pays homage to and challenges authenticity and authority--thus becomes a site for reconsidering the implications of Asian Americans as double agents. In exploring the possibilities that impersonation affords for refusing the binary logics of loyalty/disloyalty, real/fake, and Asian/American, Double Agency attends to the possibilities of reading such acts as "im-personations"--dynamic performances, and a performance dynamics--through which Asian Americans constitute themselves as speaking and acting subjects. Series: Asian America "Tina Chen's work is cutting-edge. The contextual framework of her discussions is built around the most current theoretical and interpretive concerns in the field, and she contributes an extremely useful distinction among acts of performance, impersonation, and imposture."--Garrett Hongo, University of Oregon "Tina Chen's Double Agency is an original study that enlarges our understanding of racial subject formation in the U.S. by engaging the historically laden trope of impersonation. Situating identity as performance, it is a smart study that significantly advances knowledge of how racial subjects come to be defined."--Leslie Bow, University of Wisconsin, Madison |
