The Asian American Movement in Queer Literary Retrospect

Abstract This essay considers the relationship between the Asian American movement of the late 1960s and 1970s and Asian American literary history since then. While historians and critical ethnic studies scholars have tended to valorize the movement for its interracial and internationalist radicalism, literary critics—especially feminists and queer theorists—have interrogated what they deem the era’s US-centric, heteromasculinist cultural nationalism. My approach attempts to bridge these disciplinary divides between retrieval (reconfiguring activist lessons for the present) and disavowal (getting beyond narrow conceptions of Asian American identity) by theorizing a queer diachronic method that reads contemporary historiographical literature for its critical reflections on three ideological formations—Black Power, global Maoism, and Vietnamese anti-imperialism—that both generated politicized Asian American panethnicity and hindered the flourishing of Asian American queerness.