Thus, vote aff to endorse the performance of the 1AC as a praxis of Asian American countermemory – the story telling of [whatever story you use] is an instance of speculative fiction that is able to provide space for resistances outside of legal pathology

Asian American Stories and the Law: Remembrance and Resistance

By producing literature, Asian American writers contribute to the development of Asian American culture as an equally important but forgotten facet of American culture that was silenced and marginalized by discriminatory laws. Maxine Hong Kingston, for example, engages in countermemory in her novels to challenge the assumption that national memory and history are necessarily objective. In a chapter entitled “The Laws” that appears squarely in the center of China Men, Kingston interrupts her narrative with a list of laws to illustrate how the experiences of not only the characters in her book but also all Asian Americans have been mediated through the laws. Brook Thomas has noted that because of the inclusion of “The Laws,” the publishers did not know how to classify the book and labeled it “Nonfiction/Literature.”62 The section, however, is not intended to be an exact legal chronology, and as a work of fiction, it takes creative liberties with historical accuracy. Kingston’s purposeful imprecisions in her retelling of “The Laws” serves as a reminder that American legal structures are not objective but rather mired in a history of racism and exclusion that promotes only one dominant perspective and silences others.

In China Men as well as Woman Warrior, Kingston utilizes the Hawai’ian convention of talk-story, where people engage in friendly, in-depth conversation to “learn about each other and to break the grip of the stock stories that too often determine or at least constrain our perceptual fields and hence our reality.”63 Hawai’ian talk-story incorporates multiple cultural traditions brought together on the island, reflecting the hybridity of identity there. Talk-story can also function as a form of alternative dispute resolution: that is, to solve disagreements through talking things out without resorting to formal legal mechanisms.64 By evoking talk-story, Kingston offers narrative fiction as an alternative space to dialogue for reaching resolutions for injustice. Because, as Charles Lawrence argues, American legal values cannot be objective because racism and oppression are so embedded in American legal history as to become unconscious, the American legal system cannot always offer adequate solutions to the concerns of the Asian American community.65 Kingston demonstrates the place of Asian American fiction as an alternative space to give voice to the silences that law has produced.

Critical race theorists such as Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Patricia Williams argue that the American legal system has silenced and precluded the stories of people of color from its founding, and thus they look to alternative narrative spaces to expose and critically evaluate the exclusions created by the laws.66 For the last century and a half, the lives and experiences of Asian Americans have largely been negotiated through laws governing immigration and citizenship. Although the restrictive laws sought to rob them of a culture of their own, first through marginalization and exclusion and then through assimilation and hegemonization to the dominant American narrative, Asian Americans have begun to reclaim and redefine their culture since the latter half of the 20th century. Asian American writers and Asian American literature have provided a space outside of law to counter the dominant narratives that law produces and demonstrate the will of the community to resist becoming silent victims of those laws.