Filthy Fictions

In focusing on dirt as a unifying metaphor, Filthy Fictions productively advances our understanding of the processes of racial formation and its enmeshing with sexual difference. Monica Chiu pushes the topic in often unexpected directions: not its literal appearance as trash or contaminant, but as sexual impurity, bestiality, food taboos, and hypochondria. In theorizing race as pathology, her book creates a ground-floor discussion of the political investments of a number of noncanonical Asian American texts. In the end, her concern is not really about filth, but about the transformation of 'nature' into culture and the violence that attends that transformation. -- Leslie Bow, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The author's fresh, energetic voice and unique perspective make this volume a pleasure to read. Chiu takes on the subject of filth or dirt in the works of Asian American women writers in order to examine the ways in which these writers are subverting racist stereotypes in some cases and, in others, participating in the perpetuation of a damaging idea. Filth, or as Chiu labels it, 'pejorative matter,' takes many forms but is often connected to sexuality, foodways, ethnic traditions, animals and femininity. The political saliency of this topic is so obvious that one wonders why scholars have ignored it to this point. Chiu looks at a number of writers who have been largely ignored by critics of Asian American literature—Chuang Hua, Ginu Kamani, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Ruth Ozeki. In framing her study, she pays particular attention to Shirley Geok-lin Lim's work on global feminism, but she also broadly applies interdisciplinary concepts from a number of leading feminist critics of the past 20 years. Highly recommended. -- J. Tharp, University of Wisconsin Colleges * CHOICE, October 2004 *