Asian fighters in U.S. minority literature: Iconology, intimacy, and other imagined communities

This study focuses on literature as a productive form to reflect on the intricate nexus between the iconic image and sociopolitical embodiments. Drawing from Benedict Anderson's definition of the nation as an imagined community, this study examines U.S. minority literature and how the icon of the Asian fighter---the Viet Cong, the gook, the martial artist---can manage another "style" of imagining the intimacy binding such communities. The questions toward which this study is geared are: How does literature theorize the relationship between popular images of Asians and the formation of both individual racial bodies and counterhegemonic political bodies? How are such bodies shaped by gendered discourses of the body and of intimacy understood through one's relationship to icons?;I look at U.S. minority literature as a metadiscourse on the image, or as "iconology": these texts talk about how images are talked about by engaging with genre, rhetoric, and storytelling and with how such literary practices shape and intervene in dominant forms of knowledge about racial bodies. In U.S. popular culture, the Asian fighter figure is read as an embodiment of what threatens the nation. Reading this icon across minority literatures reveals that such images can serve other ideological functions, for example, as a way to decolonize black being, to conceive of Chicano identity and experience within a context of U.S. imperialism, and to position the Chinaman not as a subject of any geopolitical state but a transnational figure participating in the civil society of the global marketplace.;These writers figure the racialized male body as emasculated and as not among the national fraternity. The icon of the Asian fighter mediates the remasculinization of racial bodies through rejecting the nation as the site for defining racial bodies. Thus while the Asian fighter inspires another conception of racial bodies, I am careful to note the unquestioned gender assumptions in the communities imagined, thus extending an Asian American feminist critique of this masculine figure. In refraining these communities through the Asian fighter icon, these texts reiterate a gendered discourse of intimacy also central to imagining the nation.