Examining Asian American literature from 1968 until the present, what readers encounter is a body of literature and ways of thinking about that literature that have grown rapidly in content, complexity, and contradiction. Within an academic context, the Asian American literary criticism pioneered by Elaine Kim was disruptive in terms of introducing an entirely new body of writers and texts to consider. The emergence of Asian American literature as an academic field, in the end, cannot be separated from the emergence of Asian Americans as a partially excluded and partially included minority in all strata of American life, including literature and the academy. In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, Asian Americans were mostly excluded from American life and culture, and this exclusion eventually led to a relatively unified and coherent definition of Asian American literature.