Theory Review: Lee's Semblance of Identity (2012)

Lee, Christopher. The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2012.

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.

Theory Review: Berlant's Cruel Optimism (2011)

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011.

In Cruel Optimism Lauren Berlant reveals that despite deteriorating social, economic, and environmental conditions, people still remain attached to fantasies of the "good life"; her research examines how such fantasies have survived even when conditions for survival are increasingly compromised under postwar neoliberal restructuring. She posits “cruel optimism” as a relational dynamic whereby individuals remain attached to “compromised conditions of possibility” or “clusters of promises” embedded in desired object-ideas even when they inhibit the conditions for flourishing and fulfilling such promises (24, 23). For Berlant, optimism is a formal or structural feeling, such that an “optimistic attachment is invested in one’s own or the world’s continuity, but might feel any number of ways,” including not optimistic at all (13). In other words, maintaining attachments that sustain the good life fantasy, no matter how injurious or cruel these attachments may be, allows people to make it through day-to-day life when the day-to-day has become unlivable. Berlant is essentially concerned with conditions of living or the state of the “present,” which she describes as structured through “crisis ordinariness,” and turns to affect and aesthetics as a way of apprehending these crises; by tracking the various impasses we face today, she suggests that it becomes possible to recognize that certain “genres” are no longer sustainable in the present and that new emergent aesthetic forms are taking hold, alternative genres that allow us to recognize modes of living not rooted in normative good life fantasies.