Making a Necessity of Extravagance: Work and Play in the Asian American(ist) Economy

Abstract

Revisiting Sau-Ling Wong’s Reading Asian American Literature, this chapter posits its key terms of Necessity and Extravagance, which counterbalance tendencies toward freedom with the force of constraint, as analytics toward apprehending a larger Asian American(ist) economy where work and play traffic in the circulation and distribution of energy, value, and desire. Asian American(ist) economy names two interdependent modes of operations. The first operates descriptively, mapping the economy of activities, attachments, and resources that undergird the racial formation of Asian America. The second manifests itself prescriptively through attempts by racial projects to articulate the cathexis of energies toward specific objectives, defining the work that “Asian American” can and should do. Centering Necessity and Extravagance reassesses Asian American literary debates around texts, contexts, and inter-texts wherein Extravagance becomes bound to anxieties about excess: libidinal, theoretical, and capitalist. Necessity and Extravagance provide valuable methods for contending with such excesses alongside shifting permutations of race and Asian Americanness from 1965 to 1996.