Cirrus@Austlit

This article examines The Boat as a coherent collection of stories that self-consciously takes up, in 'Love and Honor,' some central debates in Asian American literary studies: questions of cultural authenticity, authorial ownership, responsible representation of trauma, the selling out of the community by subsequent generations, and what constitutes Asian American literature and/or 'ethnic literature.' It argues that Le complicates the concept of ethnic literature through the middle stories of the collection by imbricating the ethnic with the cosmopolitan, two concepts that are usually viewed in opposition, to arrive at the idea of 'refugee cosmopolitanism' in the final story, 'The Boat' (Author's abstract).