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This article keeps track of the locus of the rise and development of Asian American literary criticism from the 1960s up until early twenty-first century. It goes without saying that much of Asian American criticism can be characterized by its definitional struggle of what is Asian, what is American, and what is Asian American. One of my central argument is that such a struggle is not so much a question of essence underlying those categories as a question of the discursive and social relations through which an identity can both stake and secure its specific claims. Against the backdrop of an American universal of abstract citizenship that has been presented as an inclusive universal but translated historically and materially as a practice of excluding other particulars, this article examines the critical moments and contentious debates in the early history of Asian American literary history as a means of catching a glimpse of a theoretical vista from which to determines a future direction of Asian American literary criticism in the age where Asian American identity has been transformed by the continuous flow of people, capital, and products, and its multiple and shifting definitions can be no longer of any use for its points of reference places of origin or destination.