Filthy Fictions

Monica Chiu is an assistant professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, teaching courses in American literature, Asian American literature, Asian American film, and literature and the body. Her work has appeared in MELUS, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, the Journal of American Studies, and Mosaic.

In focusing on dirt as a unifying metaphor, Filthy Fictions productively advances our understanding of the processes of racial formation and its enmeshing with sexual difference. Monica Chiu pushes the topic in often unexpected directions: not its literal appearance as trash or contaminant, but as sexual impurity, bestiality, food taboos, and hypochondria. In theorizing race as pathology, her book creates a ground-floor discussion of the political investments of a number of noncanonical Asian American texts. In the end, her concern is not really about filth, but about the transformation of 'nature' into culture and the violence that attends that transformation.

• 1 Introduction: Pejorative Matter2 Abjection, Displacement, and Psychological Dissonance in Crossings3 Kamani's Crass, Classed, and Incurable Female Bodies4 Animals and Systems of Dirt in the Works of Lois-Ann Yamanaka5 Inside the Meat Machine: Food, Filth, and (In)Fertility in My Year of Meats6 Conclusion: Filth and Asian American Literary Criticism7 References