During the first half of the 20th century, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay operated as detention barracks for Asian immigrants. For 30 years, detainees inscribed the walls of the facility with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other Asian-language poetry. At the same time as immigrants were transforming the very walls that held them captive into a multilingual canvas, Theodore Roosevelt, the president of the United States, was declaring that “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language.”

As the inscriptions at Angel Island attest, Asian American literature has long engaged with the dominance of English as a critical axis of power in regards to immigration, nationalism, and the legacies of colonialism. Further, the materiality and form of the texts lay bare the workings of language as ingenious, transgressive, and at times even violent challenges to the status quo. This panel considers that rich history and asks what the future of language in Asian American literature might be a century after the operation of the Angel Island detention center. The panel presenters represent diverse institutions, from both the United States and Canada, and a range of career stages, from early career and non-tenure track to senior scholar. What each addresses in their paper, though, speaks to the role of language in contemporary Asian American texts.

Eleanor Ty begins the panel with an examination of the intersection of image and text in Robin Ha’s graphic memoir Almost American Girl. Through her visualization, Ha illustrates the way a multilanguage speaker thinks and acts, showing us what happens underneath their veneer of silence and forced smiles. Robin’s interior complexity, which she is unable to articulate, is revealed to the readers in a number of key ways, including different colors inside of speech balloons and scribbles in the place of language. In this paper Ty examines how comics provides Ha with the tools to show her developing Korean diasporic identity and how telling the story of how she becomes the “almost American girl” through images and texts reveals the complexity of the multilingual experience.

Continuing Ty’s discussion of multilingual complexity within an image-based text, Rachel Norman examines another Asian American graphic memoir, I Was Their American Dream by Malaka Gharib. Within her book, Gharib presents her Filipino Egyptian American family and her struggle to navigate not only the dominant Anglo-American culture, but the clashes between her Arab and Filipino identities. Gharib often punctuates these moments with reflections on language, primarily Tagalog and Arabic. Beyond merely creating a literary space (or perhaps a Deleuzian third space) of belonging for herself, though, Gharib insists upon the co-creation of this space with her reader. Gharib utilizes the unique qualities of comics—a genre hailed by scholars as exceptionally participatory—to teach her reader both Tagalog and Arabic. Through a variety of unusual methods, including flashcards that she asks the reader to cut out, Gharib not only imagines what a space accepting of her hybridized identity might look like, but sets about creating it.

Elizabeth Kim concludes the panel with the presentation of a theoretical framework that challenges Norman’s reading of Gharib. Kim argues that critics have primarily discussed multilingualism and improper uses of English in Asian American literature as subversive strategies that both affirm native languages and challenge the dominance of standard English in order to reclaim and legitimize diverse linguistic practices. Kim, however, reads the hybridized language of the “Guide,” the protagonist of Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution, as exemplifying not so much an affirmation of linguistic plurality but a wariness of unquestioned optimism toward multilingualism. Further, she asserts the need to examine the diasporic protagonist’s creole language as such—an inevitable result of market-driven contact between languages—and challenges the notion of hybrid language as cosmopolitan commodity because it is firstly a product of displacement and geopolitical tension before it becomes a form of cultural capital.

Ultimately, these three papers and their complementing and contrasting theoretical frameworks promise to yield a lively discussion. Respondent Jennifer Ho will draw on her experiences as the current president of the Association of Asian American Studies to contextualize the emerging frameworks and consider them within the local context of Angel Island. Only a stone’s throw from Angel Island and its preservation of early Asian American poetry defiantly scratched into walls, MLA 2023 provides fertile ground for staging this conversation and opening up a space in which we might consider what the future holds for language in Asian American literature.