Asian American literature: A 'Christianized' re-vision

Asian American literature has reached a point of development at which writers are considering the inclusion (or rejection) of Christian themes and literary traditions. Asian American texts are increasingly using the Christian framework of thought and institutional concerns as central elements in their literary productions.; It is the contention of this paper that Christian literary traditions and conceptions provide a framework for some Christian Asian American writers by which they have constructed a Christian transnational identity through chronicling their experience of assimilation into dominant American culture. Asian American writers take differing positions in their affinity with the dominant Protestant traditions, but in one fashion or another, Asian American writers have had to consider the manner in which Biblical tropes, themes, and precepts have embedded their texts. In the larger sociopolitical arena, Christianized immigrants to America from Asian countries have reconfigured Christian conceptual framework and practices to further construct a communal transnational Christian identity.; In The Rites of Assent (1993), Sacvan Bercovitch describes the Puritan process of self-discovery in America as three synchronous negotiations with their environment: "America is simultaneously internalized, universalized (as a set of self-evident absolutes), and naturalized (as a diversity of representative social, credal, racial, and ethnic selves)." Bercovitch's construct of the Puritan experience provides a framework to analyze the immigration experience of disparate groups of Asian Americans. Asian Americans have undergone an acculturation process as well---in their acceptance or rejection of dominant values, struggles with assimilation, and adoption of Christian "mythico-historiography" to come to a synthesis, inventing their own personal and communal identities.; Similarities between American canonical texts and particular Asian American texts indicate that Christian tropes and themes are embedded in genres such as the conversion and captivity narratives, among others; the satiric counter-voice to Christianized Asian American literary works gives a contrary view; Asian American Christian institutions construct communal identity through their reconfiguration of Christian literary and sociopolitical practices; crosscultural Asian American literature expand the Asian American Christian identity to include the increasing panethnic concerns; finally, Asian American identity takes on a global perspective through the writings of dissident Chinese writers.