Can there be identity without identity politics in Asian American literature? In contemporary Asian American literary-critical discourse, Christopher Lee argues, the implicit, prevailing answer is a resounding “yes,” and it is the inadequacy of this answer that he strives to demonstrate in his book The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature. As the title of his book asserts, Lee's argument is built on the aesthetic theory of semblance – that identity in Asian American literature is not a matter of factual or actual representations but a matter of semblance (something that is, but is not) and precisely upon that matter of presence/non-presence, semblance wields the power of art to transform cognitive activity. Thus Lee's argument is built on the aesthetic theories of Kant, on critical theory, and most foundationally on Adorno – and performs a fresh and an invigorating approach to the debate over identity and identity politics that perennially grips not only Asian American critical discourse but all minority discourse.

Lee begins by painting a contemporary critical landscape that he calls “the post-identity condition” laid out in works of scholars such as Rey Chow, Lisa Lowe, Susan Koshy, Kandice Chuh, Colleen Lye, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, who influentially led the interrogation and refutation of identity politics in Asian American literary discourse (1). In this post-identity condition, identity politics can readily seem to be an outdated force – a principle and a practice necessary in the formative years of the late 1960s and the 1970s when the Asian American movement, like many other minority movements of the times, required large-scale identifications based on commonality and unity for political and institutional visibility. While Lee explores the political, institutional, and theoretical repercussions of forced unity, homogeneity, and repression that can result from the politics of commonality, he contests any attempt at simplistic characterization of identity politics as a necessary evil that has long outlived its relevance.

On the contrary, identity politics is a perennial force in any identity formation, and the central argument of The Semblance of Identity is that the knowledge of the dialectical interplay between “identitarian logic” and “post-identitarian logic” crucially influences some of the biggest debates in contemporary Asian American literary discourse – who is the subject of Asian American literature? What accounts for the visibility, or invisibility, of some works of Asian American literature? What are the comparative dimensions of Asian American literature in relation to fields such as ethnic literature, postcolonial literature, or anglophone literature? These are the questions variously posed to a wide spectrum of Asian American writers and texts: to the obscurity of Eileen Chang's bilingual writings, to the cultural nationalism of Frank Chin's writings, to the best-known disruption of identity politics represented by Maxine Hong Kingston's works, to the conflict over identity politics in Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Life, and to the politics of comparison invoked by Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost.

The Semblance of Identity makes the intriguing – and polemical – argument that these works are representative of “the staying power of identitarian thought [in Asian American literature], even in texts that are ambiguous about, or even critical of, identity politics” (151). In asserting the presence of identity politics as an inevitable condition of identity formation, Lee's provocative argument invites an automatic challenge: how does the critic access this force that apparently appears despite the intentions of the writer or the literary work, that sometimes appears “unwittingly,” as Lee puts it (13)?

The unique nature of Lee's answer to this question – and what distinguishes his intervention from other scholarship about Asian American literature and identity – lies in his turn to the cognitive dimension of form. His analytic framework begins from a transcendental theory of Kant's theory of form – that form, far from being a issue of style distinct from matter, is an affective, transformative cognitive force – and moves on to the theories of realism of Georg Lukacs and Frederic Jameson. However, the foundational framework for Lee's theoretical approach lies in Adorno's aesthetic theory, in whose theories of art's “semblance character” Lee grounds the negative capability of art – that art reveals the hidden, the unspeakable, the forbidden, the impossible, and the irreconcilable. Thus the kernel of Lee's argument is located in the following passage from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory:

That the meaning of these works – that is, the dialectic of identitarian and post-identitarian thought – reveals itself throughout Asian American literature is the ongoing argument of Lee's analysis, and that this meaning/dialectic reveals itself through form – through the competing ideologies of fiction, of realism, of specific genres and of modes – is the entirely innovative intervention of Lee's book. Concomitantly, this broad provocation invites larger, ongoing questions: does this dialectic of identity apply to all Asian American literature, regardless of the historical, material specificity of its production and reception? Indeed, is the dialectic of identity an integral condition of identity itself?