English
Popular genres and new media
Document Type
Book Chapter
Abstract
The Perils and Possibilities of Popular Genres: The new millennium has been a banner time for Asian American writers of popular genres. In the past decade, we have witnessed new Asian American writers win top awards in science fiction and fantasy, enjoy healthy sales in crime fiction and “chick lit” romance, and create viral new-media productions in the digital sphere. Indeed, popular fiction and new media are the new playgrounds for Asian American writers, offering vast, devoted fan bases (for broad audience reach), nonrealist narrative toolboxes (for formal as well as social and ideological “thought” experiments), and readily accessible digital creative and publishing apparatuses (for immediate distribution). The exponential growth and variety of literary and new-media productions among Asian Americans in this period testify to the way that popular genres have inspired the field to go where it has not gone before. Despite the contemporaneity of both bodies of literature's emergence and development into legible literary institutions over the course of the twentieth century, the odds were somewhat stacked against their cross-pollination. The popular genres’ rather inglorious histories of racist and sexist representations as well as exclusionary practices against writers of color proved uninviting for Asian American writers. And until recently, Asian American writers made few forays into romance, crime fiction, and science fiction because of these genres’ historically disreputable status among mainstream and academic literary establishments. Because Asian American literature's legibility and legitimacy in the U.S. literary and cultural consciousness are hard earned, writing genre fiction, commonly perceived as lowbrow and derivative, would appear misguided or even irresponsible. Recounting his experience as a budding science fiction writer during his undergraduate years at Brown University, acclaimed science fiction writer Ted Chiang recalls the instructor's discouraging words in the first creative writing class he ever took: Those who intend to write “genre fiction” will not find a place for them in the course. The instructor's dismissal not only exemplifies what science fiction scholar Marleen S. Barr calls the pervasive “textism” that genre has had to endure from the academy and the mainstream literati but also reveals the reputational stakes for those who wish to write it.
Publication Title
The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature
Publication Date
2015
First Page
142
Last Page
154
ISBN
9781316155011
DOI
10.1017/CBO9781316155011.013
Keywords
Asian-American literature, genre fiction, textism
Repository Citation
Huang, Betsy, "Popular genres and new media" (2015). English. 19.
https://commons.clarku.edu/facenglish/19
