Department of English

• Monday, September 28, 2026 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall Grad Student Lounge (room 330)

Eileen' WIP is titled "A Literary Theory of the Enclave." Please see below for their abstract: 

In 1950, a young ceramicist named Jade Snow Wong published a novel that would become far and away the most commercially successful work of Asian American writing until the late eighties. Its fate, however, was far less sanguine among the artists, critics, and activists who would go on to found the field of Asian American studies. Fifth Chinese Daughter is perhaps best known today as a kind of problem-text for the field—an awkward, pandering piece of liberal apologia that, despite intermittent efforts at scholarly rescue, continues to sit uncomfortably within the canon. 
 
This chapter returns to Wong’s anomalous text to argue that it attempts, often unsuccessfully, to manage a set of changes in the character of Asian labor central to the development of the Asian American novel. To do so requires that we dislodge several common assumptions about Fifth Chinese Daughter: that it is not a novel but an autobiography, that it ferries a notion of Chineseness fixed in tradition, and that its focal contradiction is essentially cultural. If the novel is politically transparent, it is formally oblique. Yet its strangeness, I suggest, stems not from an alien culture—for this is already carefully domesticated—but from a succession of uncanny, compound spaces: the factory-home, the plantation-campus, and the storefront-workshop. In this way, the novel can be read not only as an effort to reconcile “East” and “West,” but also as an attempt to mediate the negative and positive faces of capitalism, here presented as production and social reproduction, or working and living. Taking up Sylvia Wynter’s notion of “plot” as both spatial and narrative vector, the chapter asks what affordances Wong’s emplotment of the emergent chronotope of the “enclave” has for our understanding of postwar property relations, on the one hand, and the status of home and work in the Asian American novel, on the other.