Sansei and Sensibility

Sansei and Sensibility PDF Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566895863
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Book Description
In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance—familial, cultural, emotional, artistic—really means. In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace ballroom dances, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with and humor.

Tropic of Orange

Tropic of Orange PDF Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
An apocalypse of race, class, and culture, fanned by the media and the harsh L.A. sun.

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest PDF Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566895049
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
"Fluid and poetic as well as terrifying." —New York Times Book Review "Dazzling . . . a seamless mixture of magic realism, satire and futuristic fiction." —San Francisco Chronicle "Impressive . . . a flight of fancy through a dreamlike Brazil." —Village Voice "Surreal and misty, sweeping from one high-voltage scene to another." —LA Weekly "Amuses and frightens at the same time." —Newsday "Incisive and funny, this book yanks our chains and makes us see the absurdity that rules our world." —Booklist (starred review) "Expansive and ambitious . . . incredible and complicated." —Library Journal "This satiric morality play about the destruction of the Amazon rain forest unfolds with a diversity and fecundity equal to its setting. . . . Yamashita seems to have thrown into the pot everything she knows and most that she can imagine—all to good effect." —Publishers Weekly A Japanese man with a ball floating six inches in front of his head, an American CEO with three arms, and a Brazilian peasant who discovers the art of healing by tickling one's earlobe, rise to the heights of wealth and fame, before arriving at disasters—both personal and ecological—that destroy the rain forest and all the birds of Brazil. Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award.

Anime Wong

Anime Wong PDF Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566893402
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Book Description
Giant foam rubber sushi and cyborg kungfu fighters populate performances that reflect questions of gender, identity, orientalism, and racial politics.

Letters to Memory

Letters to Memory PDF Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781566894876
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This dive into the Yamashita family archive and Japanese internment runs a documentary impulse through filters that shimmer with imagination.

Brazil-Maru

Brazil-Maru PDF Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781566890168
Category : Japanese
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
When the United States closed its doors to Japanese immigrants, hundreds of thousands of them made their way to the coffee plantations and the then-open spaces of Brazil. In this engrossing multigenerational novel, award-winning author Karen Tei Yamashita tells the story of one idealistic band of these immigrants, who arrive in 1925 on a ship named the Brazil-Maru and set out to carve a utopia out of the jungle. Led by the charismatic Kantaro Uno, the pioneers create a civilization built around his passions for baseball, painting, chickens, and their own socialist sentiments. They endure struggles in clearing the land, maintaining their identity, adapting to a new world, and fighting the backlash caused by World War II. Inevitably, however, the turbulent course Kantaro has set leads the community called Esperanca in a direction no one could have predicted. Told through the eyes of five characters covering three generations of Esperanca's history, Brazil-Maru explores themes that resonate with the reality of all immigrant history: the dream of creating a new world, the cost of idealism, the symbiotic tie between a people and the land they settle, and the changes demanded by the appearance of a new generation.

Circle K Cycles

Circle K Cycles PDF Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Book Description
With skill, imagination, and wit, Yamashita defines an emerging challenge of twenty-first century global society.

Across Meridians

Across Meridians PDF Author: Jinqi Ling
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804782040
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways. In Across Meridians, Jinqi Ling offers readers the most critically engaged examination to date of Yamashita's literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, Ling's study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism. Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North-South vector into the East-West conceptual paradigm, Ling highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, Ling designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, Ling sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, he argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice.

Traces of Trauma

Traces of Trauma PDF Author: Boreth Ly
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824856090
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
How do the people of a morally shattered culture and nation find ways to go on living? Cambodians confronted this challenge following the collective disasters of the American bombing, the civil war, and the Khmer Rouge genocide. The magnitude of violence and human loss, the execution of artists and intellectuals, the erasure of individual and institutional cultural memory all caused great damage to Cambodian arts, culture, and society. Author Boreth Ly explores the “traces” of this haunting past in order to understand how Cambodians at home and in the diasporas deal with trauma on such a vast scale. Ly maintains that the production of visual culture by contemporary Cambodian artists and writers—photographers, filmmakers, court dancers, and poets—embodies traces of trauma, scars leaving an indelible mark on the body and the psyche. Her book considers artists of different generations and family experiences: a Cambodian-American woman whose father sent her as a baby to the United States to be adopted; the Cambodian-French filmmaker, Rithy Panh, himself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, whose film The Missing Picture was nominated for an Oscar in 2014; a young Cambodian artist born in 1988—part of the “post-memory” generation. The works discussed include a variety of materials and remnants from the historical past: the broken pieces of a shattered clay pot, the scarred landscape of bomb craters, the traditional symbolism of the checkered scarf called krama, as well as the absence of a visual archive. Boreth Ly’s poignant book explores obdurate traces that are fragmented and partial, like the acts of remembering and forgetting. Her interdisciplinary approach, combining art history, visual studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, religion, and philosophy, is particularly attuned to the diverse body of material discussed, including photographs, video installations, performance art, poetry, and mixed media. By analyzing these works through the lens of trauma, she shows how expressions of a national trauma can contribute to healing and the reclamation of national identity.

No-no Boy

No-no Boy PDF Author: John Okada
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Japanese
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description