There are arguably few writers whose work compels to recognize features of Asian American literary studies as powerfully as does Karen Tei Yamashita. Her work not only elucidates the preoccupation of Asian American literary studies with spatial thinking, but also exemplifies a playful critical curiosity that manifests through formal experimentation and an unusually capacious imagination. Yamashita thickens time and space such that the depth and breadth of the material grounds that form the conditions of possibility for life and thought are brought to bear on the apprehension of present circumstances. As Asian American literature became established as a category of literary criticism in the closing decades of the twentieth century, it came to reflect Asian American studies' commitments to the pursuit of social justice and the eradication of inequality. In sharp contrast to commonplace understandings of aesthetics as delinked from politics or questions of material equality, Yamashita's work exemplifies the worldliness of aesthetics.