Books

Palumbo-Liu's first book publication (The Poetics of Appropriation: The Literary Theory and Practice of Huang Tingjian, 1045-1105, Stanford University Press, 1993) addressed the notion of authorship and poetic language in Song dynasty China, taking as its focal point the work of Huang Tingjian, one of the most difficult poets in the Chinese tradition because of his dense use of recondite allusions. This study argued that the poetry of citation was completely in line with the Song project to reassess and classify all prior knowledge, and to invent a distinct cultural identity from those discourses. This book begins and ends with chapters that compare the seemingly contradictory elements of learning and spontaneity, and their relation to textuality, to similar discussions in western poetics.

His second book was an edited volume, The Ethnic Canon: History, Institutions, Interventions (Minnesota, 1995). In his critical introduction, Palumbo-Liu addresses the historical occasion of multiculturalism and charts the various functions and histories of the institutionalization of ethnic literature in the U.S. academy. The anthology itself, with essays by Norma Alarcòn, Rosaura Sanchez, Ramòn Saldìvar, Sau-ling Wong, Lisa Lowe, Colleen Lye, E. San Juan, Jr., Elliott Butler-Evans, Barbara Christian, Paula Gunn Allen, and Jana Sequoya-Magdelena, argues for a contestative and critical multicultural pedagogy.

His third book publication, co-edited with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, is entitled, Streams of Cultural Capital: Transnational Cultural Studies (special issue of Stanford Literature Review, 1993; rpt., Stanford University Press, 1997). Palumbo-Liu's introductory essay explores how Bourdieu's concept, while demonstrating the social function of "culture," is hard-pressed to address transnational cultural movements, which engage a wide variety of agents and media. The essays, from around the globe, analyze discrete cases of transnational movements and refigurations, recombinations, and reterritorializations of cultural objects. Broadly addressed to the notion of "global culture," this anthology argues instead that we attend to the local manifestations of transnational flows of culture. Essays by Arjun Appadurai, Chen Xiaomei, Biodun Jeyifo, Bruce and Judith Kapferer, Anne Knudsen, Mary Layoun, Jean-François Lyotard, Carlos Rincón, Robert Weimann, and others.

Palumbo-Liu's fourth book, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, was published in 1999 by Stanford University Press and is in its second printing. It was awarded the distinction of "Choice Outstanding Academic Book Title" by Choice. This book is a long interdisciplinary study of "Asian America." Seeing the modern identity of America as inseparable from its notion of a Pacific Destiny, Palumbo-Liu focuses on the production of the identity "Asian/American." He argues that the "proximity" of Asian Americans to that ideal of "American" should be read as a history of persistent reconfigurations and transgressions of the Asian/American "split," designated by a solidus that signals those instances in which a liaison between "Asian" and "American," a sliding over between two seemingly separate terms, is constituted.

As in the construction "and/or," where the solidus at once instantiates a choice between two terms, their simultaneous and equal status, and an element of indecidability, that is, as it at once implies both exclusion and inclusion, "Asian/American" marks both the distinction installed between "Asian" and "American" and a dynamic, unsettled, and inclusive movement.

He moves through readings of the material histories of Asian America (restructured urban geographies, the wars in Asia, the transformation of Asian American space into Pacific Rim space), as well as the ways the Asian/American liaison has been read as a psychic symptom. Chronologically beginning with the 1920s' political and juridical discourses on American nationhood and Asia, and sociological attempts to read race in America, the study ends with an examination of the formation of "Asia Pacific" and its projection into a "borderless" cyberspace of a particularly liquid capital. This Asian "alternate modernity" is of course abruptly curtailed with the collapse of the Asian economies. The study follows closely both the way Asian identity is mapped in the crucible of multiracial dynamics in the U.S. (i.e., the racial categories of "brown," "black," and "white"), and the invention of diasporic identities, as both take part in the refiguring of American national identity.