In The Semblance of Identity Christopher
Lee examines the ongoing debate in Asian American studies over identity
politics and its political efficacy; he claims that rather than presenting “an
argument for or against identity and identity politics,” his “aim is to explore
the consequences of the ‘post-identity’ turn” (3). Lee approaches the issue of
identity (and post-identity) in Asian American studies by tracing what he
describes as “the ‘idealized critical subject,’” a figure that “operates throughout
Asian American literary culture and cultural criticism as a means of providing
coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices” (4). By working
through Theodor Adorno’s conception of “aesthetic semblance” as “the kinds of
knowledge that artworks offer by virtue of their appearance and illusory
coherence,” Lee establishes a parallel between aesthetics and identity (17). He
tracks the idealized critical subject as an aesthetic figure that manifests in
Asian American literary productions and demonstrates in the unraveling of the
form and content of these texts the “theoretical structures of race and
identity” (17). Ultimately, while Lee’s work does demonstrate how
representations of Asian American identity have always been unstable, his focus
on the idealized critical subject reveals how despite its flaws, identitarian thinking
continues to persist even amidst the proliferation of anti- and post-identity
discourses.
