| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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In-betweenness has been explored mainly in the fields of literary studies and anthropology by scholars such as Lowe, Narayan, and Visweswaran. While Lowe, Narayan, and Visweswaran do not completely abandon the trope of generationality, they viewed it from multiple perspectives, looking at how issues of race, gender, multiculturalism, ethnicity, and class intersect with generations.
Lisa Lowe (1996) argued,
Lowe argued that the term Asian American is a racial category encompassing a wide range of peoples from the Asian continent, complicating the perception of Asian Americans as a racial group. However, the predominance of generational conflict as the dominant narrative of the Asian American experience has been aided by the popularity of such narratives in the mainstream such as Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club (1989) and Maxine Hong King-ston’s Woman Warrior (1989). Lisa Lowe (1996) and Vijay Prashad (2000) would both agree that the Orientalism pervading the mainstream abets in the production and consumption of narratives about generational conflict, obscuring the heterogeneity of Asian Americans and promoting a master narrative that pits generation of the parents against the generation of their children. For instance, the proliferation of generational conflict as the dominant narrative of intergenerationality of Asian Americans as portrayed in popular media is bolstered by media industries that view this paradigm as a marketable commodity. In such narratives of intergenerationality, Asian parents are often exoticized as “traditional” and “Eastern,” while their American-born children are often contrasted as “modern” and “Western.”