Introduction : the aesthetic in Asian American literary discourse / Sue-Im Lee -- Asian American critical discourse in Academia. Autonomy and representation : aesthetics and the crisis of Asian American cultural politics in the controversy over Blu's hanging / Mark Chiang ; Interventing innocence : race, 'resistance, ' and the Asian North American avant-garde / Iyko Day -- Aesthetics and ethnicity. The Asian American in a turtleneck : fusing the aesthetic and the didactic in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster monkey / Mita Banerjee ; The language of ethnicity : John Yau's poetry and the ethnic/aesthetic divide / Christina Mar ; "A flame against a sleeping lake of petrol" : form and the sympathetic witness in Selvadurai's Funny boy and Ondaatje's Anil's ghost / Patricia P. Chu ; Poignant pleasures : feminist ethics as aesthetics in Juhmpa Lahiri and Naita Rao Badami / Gita Rajan -- Intertexts : Asian American writing and literary movements. "A loose horse" : Asian American poetry and the aesthetics of the ideogram / Josephine Nock-Hee Park ; "A new rule for the imagination" : rewriting modernism in Bone / Donatella Izzo -- Rewriting form, reading for new expression. Performing dialogic subjectivities : the aesthetic project of autobiographical collaboration in Days and nights in Calcutta / RociÌ?o G. Davis ; Bicultural world creation : Laurence Yep, Cynthia Kadohata, and Asian American fantasy / Celestine Woo ; Dismantling the realist character in Velina Hasu Houston's Tea and David Henry Hwang's FOB / Kimberly M. Jew.