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Tricksters and Cosmopolitans is the first sustained exploration into the history of cross-cultural collaborations between Asian American writers and their non–Asian American editors and publishers. The volume focuses on the literary production of the cosmopolitan subject, featuring the writers Sui Sin Far, Jessica Hagedorn, Karen Tei Yamashita, Monique Truong, and Min Jin Lee. The newly imagined cosmopolitan subject that emerges from their works dramatically reconfigured Asian American female subjectivity in metropolitan space with a kind of fluidity and ease never before seen. But as Rei Magosaki shows, these narratives also invariably expose the problematic side of this figure, which also serves to perpetuate exploitative structures of Western imperialism and its legacies in late capitalism.
Arguing that the actual establishment of such a critical standpoint on imperialism and globalization required the expansive and internationalist vision of editors who supported, cultivated, and promoted these works, Tricksters and Cosmopolitans reveals the negotiations between these authors and their publishers and between the shared investment in both politics and aesthetics that influenced the narrative structure of key works in the Asian American literary canon.
A timely and groundbreaking study of Asian American literary production in the age of globalization. Through the double lenses of textual analysis and publication history, it sheds new light on what Magosaki calls 'trickster cosmopolitanism,' an interesting term she develops from 'Signifying' as defined in Afro-American literary history and applies to her study of the work of Asian American women writers. Tricksters Cosmopolitanism is a unique book that makes important contribution to Asian American literature and global and feminist studies.---—Yunte Huang, University of California, Santa Barbara
Tricksters and Cosmopolitans opens up a new space in exploring the field of Asian American literature for many to follow, as if mirroring the vibrancy of Asian American literary texts that continually break down rigid boundaries between a book's material history and aesthetic purview. It proposes a broader look at Asian American literature that highlights the cross-cultural reach of its production, which is why it is a welcome and needed contribution to the field of Asian American Studies.