SOURCE: Lowe, Lisa. “Decolonization, Displacement, Disidentification: Asian American ‘Novels’ and the Question of History.” In Cultural Institutions of the Novel, edited by Deidre Lynch and William B. Warner, pp. 96-128. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Lowe discusses the relationship between fictional and historical narratives in three novels by Asian American authors—Dogeaters, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, and Fae Myenne Ng's Bone.

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

Frantz Fanon directs our attention, in Black Skin, White Masks (1967), to the importance of language as the medium through which a colonizing culture forms the colonized subject: “To speak means to be in a position to use a...