Almost two decades after the publication of King-Kok Cheung's edited collection for Cambridge University Press, An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature (1997), comes Crystal Parikh and Daniel Y. Kim's The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, which, like the earlier publication, includes contributions from leading Asian American scholars affiliated mainly to North American universities. The organization of the two books – Cheung's by national groupings in Part One, followed by topic-focussed chapters in Part Two on, for example, immigration, diaspora, and gender, and Parikh and Kim's on some of these same topics as they have been developed in the twenty-first century, and others that were once on the margins of Asian American literary studies such as writing from Hawaii (in Denise Cruz and Erin Suzuki's chapter 2) or “Mixed-Race, Adoptee, and Disabled Subjectivities” (in Cathy J. Schlund-Vials and Cynthia Wu's chapter 15) – demonstrates how the field has evolved with a sense of its own tradition that is critically engaged in order to respond to the complexities of Asian American identities and experiences.

For Parikh and Kim, Asian American literature “can best be understood as a refraction of the historical currents that have shaped the Asian presence in America and the American presence in Asia” (xxii). Important historical currents include “immigration, empire, war, globalization, and law” (xxii), along with considerations of “the myriad forms of Asian American identity that are now taking shape – to see how comparative race, mixed race, and disability studies approaches move the study of Asian American literature well beyond a narrow identity politics” (xxiv). Parikh and Kim situate their Companion in terms of “a critical humanism” (xxiv), although this humanism is not quite as critical as it could have been since there is no sustained discussion of the nonhuman world, or of the approaches of environmental studies.

Parikh and Kim's Companion is divided into four sections, three of which are more overtly thematic in emphasis, and comprise three chapters each. Part One focusses on immigration, empire, and law. Part Two discusses the legacies of America's wars: in his chapter, Greg Robinson writes about the Second World War, including responses to the Japanese American internment and post-redress literature following the Civil Liberties Act of 1988; Daniel Y. Kim and Viet Thanh Nguyen discuss the literature of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, noting differences and commonalities between them in terms of, for example, “American, Japanese, and Chinese imperialism in Asia,” with “intra-Asian colonial warfare … stand[ing] in apparent tension with the panethnic solidarity upon which the very notion of Asian American cultural identity is premised” (59–60); Rajini Srikanth ends Part Two with a discussion of “‘The War on Terror’: Post-9/11 South Asian and Arab American Literature.” Before the final section of the Companion, “Identities and Postidentities,” which discusses how Asian Americanness is intersected and complicated by gender, sexuality, race, and disability, are six chapters that are more formal in their analyses. Part Three, “The Extravagance of Genre,” considers the often marginalized categories in literary studies of drama and poetry. Also in this section are chapters on popular genres like the romantic novel, science fiction, and crime fiction, as well as writing in translation and new social media.

While it is difficult for a companion guide to avoid familiar and possibly overworked preoccupations (in her Preface to Jessica Hagedorn's 1993 anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead, Elaine Kim identified such preoccupations as “railroads, ‘bachelor societies,’ and internment” in the “sacred” works of “dead yellow men”),Footnote ¹ Parikh and Kim's Companion manages to tackle immigration and internment in ways that feel familiar yet fresh, and invariably interesting, by focussing on recently published critical and literary texts. For example, Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, in their chapter “Adjudicating Asian America,” discuss the centrality of the American legal system in terms of immigration and citizenship laws to Asian Americanness, from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, through to legal changes in the 1960s that lifted immigration and miscegenation restrictions, and, more recently, the USA PATRIOT Act following the September 11 attacks. Chuh and Shimakawa cite Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and in particular its unreliable narrator Changez, for raising “the question of knowledge – of how we know others (and selves) – as a theme in the novel. In this way, the novel presses against the certainty with which such legislation as the PATRIOT Act establishes categories of suspect identity” (37).

Changez from The Reluctant Fundamentalist could quite easily find a home in Rei Magosaki's groundbreaking monograph Tricksters and Cosmopolitans: Cross-Cultural Collaborations in Asian American Literary Production. Like Chuh and Shimakawa, who understand Hamid's protagonist as a “‘flexible citizen’ … whose attachments and mobility are molded by transnational capitalism (in contrast to the classic immigrant story of aspirations to permanent residence and citizenship)” (37), Magosaki also recognizes that this kind of “cosmopolitan subject from Asia … [is] equipped with transcendent transnational mobility and cultural capital” (1). In addition to identifying a point of contrast between these two types of immigrant, albeit this time expressly in terms of class, Magosaki emphasizes the ways in which the privileged, cosmopolitan subject can serve an obscurantist function. “What most troubles me,” she says, “is that this figure that can provide us with relief from thinking about the ongoing realities of the laboring bodies of the Asian diaspora worldwide” (1–2). These realities are made all the worse by recent trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA), and the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that protect investors and multinational corporations, with, as Magosaki notes, “far-reaching consequences on existing regulations covering environmental protection, food safety, Internet freedom, and labor conditions, as well as public access to essential services like water, electricity, and gas, all the while promoting privatization of public works and financial deregulation” (15–16).

Magosaki proposes that working against these powerful global forces are “moments of human agency, daring and brillian[ce]” (16), as embodied, for her, in the traditional figure of the trickster, and, later, trickster cosmopolitanism. Through the use of double-voiced discourses, or “signifying” and “weirding,” critical concepts valued for their capacity to disrupt and subvert that she borrows from Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien respectively (3),Footnote ² Magosaki suggests that if such a figure were able to challenge systemic exploitation in the past – for example, slavery and Jim Crow and anti-Chinese exclusion laws – then it could possibly do so again. Her first chapter, “Trickster Poetics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” focusses on African American writer Charles Chesnutt and Eurasian writer Sui Sin Far, and the processes involved in producing fictions that were capable of challenging racism through its repetition and subversion in the manner of the literary trickster. Magosaki also credits their editor–publishers, Walter Hines Page and William Hayes Ward, with “bringing the ‘speaking subject’ into being” (19).

For Magosaki, tricksters and cosmopolitans are not only literary figures, but also authors and editors, who can work together to enlighten readers through cross-cultural and global exchanges about Jim Crow racism in the past, and, ideally, the “dark future choreographed by forces of global capitalism” (16). In her two remaining chapters, Magosaki's focus shifts to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chapter 2, “The Making of the Cosmopolitan Subject,” documents the cultural nationalist period in Asian America literary studies, into the “multiculturalist” 1980s as negotiated in the work of Jessica Hagedorn. Chapter 3, “L.A.–Paris–New York: The Parameters of Literary Production at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century,” features writing by Karen Tei Yamashita, Monique Truong and Min Jin Lee.

Magosaki's approach is materialist in emphasis in the sense that she analyses the emergence of tricksters and cosmopolitans in literary texts and in literary production. In each of her three main chapters, attention is given to the processes of writing, editing and publishing. Through carefully researched archival material of letters and other documents between writers and their editors, Magosaki demonstrates that a literary text is a dynamic, collaborative and cross-cultural product. She shows how some editors can preserve “raw artistic vision,” particularly in depictions of the migrant worker, while others effectively “sanitize” it for the literary marketplace (81). Marketplace concerns increased with financial deregulation at the end of the twentieth century, so that by “2001, 80 per cent of book sales were controlled by large publishing houses under foreign-based global capital” that prioritised shareholder profit over the democratic principle of free speech (82–83). Yet, as Allan Kornblum, of the small, independent Coffee House Press in Minneapolis, notes, such a priority is unsustainable: “Publishing isn't going to return 20% or even 15% on the dollar – it never has in the past, and I don't think it will in the future. I think all these changes that are making things difficult for the major houses provide an opening for smaller publishers” (85).

Smaller publishers, under the leadership of innovative individuals like Kornblum, can “serve the public good” (86), so Magosaki argues, with Karen Tei Yamashita's Coffee House Press publications, including her 1998 novel Tropic of Orange, helping readers to “notice the world to be populated by the silent laboring bodies of migrants and the dispossessed, produced and ignored by the dominating forces of globalization” (88). Magosaki in this same chapter makes a similar argument for Monique Truong's novel The Book of Salt (2004), although her attention shifts to a very different kind of poverty in the form of credit-card debt in Min Jin Lee's 2007 novel Free Food for Millionaires, which in “chick lit” tradition echoes an earlier female-authored text, The House of Mirth (1905) by Edith Wharton. Unlike Yamashita's fiction, Truong's and Lee's novels were published by large presses (Houghton Mifflin and Warner Books) that were keen to exploit the new “global postcolonial literary and the mass popular fiction marketplace” that appealed to well-healed cosmopolitan readers, the more critical among them responding to these trickster authors’ critiques of global capitalism (11–12).

Magosaki's third and final chapter ends with a quotation from Free Food for Millionaires, which (in lieu of a concluding chapter) can perhaps serve as a response to the overriding question in Tricksters and Cosmopolitans about the role of literature, and the culture industry more generally, in bringing light “moments of human agency” vis-à-vis the “dark … forces of global capitalism” (16). It is in one such moment that Lee's protagonist comes to see that these notions do not have to be “uncritically accepted” (127). If “preconceived notions” are understood as dominant ideologies justifying systems of exploitation, then there is the potential in the mainly female-authored, Asian American literary texts selected for discussion by Magosaki, and, for that matter, by Parikh and Kim's contributors in The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, to “destabilize” their uncritical acceptance – if imagination and money permit it: “what mattered was not what you could do, but what you believed you could do” (Lee quoted in Magosaki at 127).