Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and Culture

In Double Agency, Tina Chen proposes impersonation as a paradigm for teasing out the performative dimensions of Asian American literature and culture. Asian American acts of impersonation, she argues, foreground the limits of subjectivity even as they insist on the undeniable importance of subjecthood.

By decoupling imposture from impersonation, Chen shows how Asian American performances have often been misinterpreted, read as acts of betrayal rather than multiple allegiance. A central paradox informing the book--impersonation as a performance of divided allegiance that simultaneously pays homage to and challenges authenticity and authority--thus becomes a site for reconsidering the implications of Asian Americans as double agents. In exploring the possibilities that impersonation affords for refusing the binary logics of loyalty/disloyalty, real/fake, and Asian/American, Double Agency attends to the possibilities of reading such acts as im-personations--dynamic performances, and a performance dynamics--through which Asian Americans constitute themselves as speaking and acting subjects.

Author: Tina Chen
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 08/09/2005
Pages: 280
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.21lbs
Size: 9.28h x 6.08w x 0.78d
ISBN: 9780804751858

About the Author
Tina Chen is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt Univers