Author: Guiyou Huang Publisher: ISBN: 9781474469340 Category : Electronic books Languages : en Pages : 269
Book Description
This volume presents global perspectives on Asian American literature by accomplished scholars from Germany, Japan, Singapore, Spain, and the US. It covers a diverse range of interdisciplinary topics in contemporary Asian American Studies across a wide spectrum of ethnic groups.
Author: Sau-ling Cynthia Wong Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 1400821061 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 269
Book Description
A recent explosion of publishing activity by a wide range of talented writers has placed Asian American literature in the limelight. As the field of Asian American literary studies gains increasing recognition, however, questions of misreading and appropriation inevitably arise. How is the growing body of Asian American works to be read? What holds them together to constitute a tradition? What distinguishes this tradition from the "mainstream" canon and other "minority" literatures? In the first comprehensive book on Asian American literature since Elaine Kim's ground-breaking 1982 volume, Sau-ling Wong addresses these issues and explores their implications for the multiculturalist agenda. Wong does so by establishing the "intertextuality" of Asian American literature through the study of four motifs--food and eating, the Doppelg,nger figure, mobility, and play--in their multiple sociohistorical contexts. Occurring across ethnic subgroup, gender, class, generational, and historical boundaries, these motifs resonate with each other in distinctly Asian American patterns that universalistic theories cannot uncover. Two rhetorical figures from Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, "Necessity" and "Extravagance," further unify this original, wide-ranging investigation. Authors studied include Carlos Bulosan, Frank Chin, Ashley Sheun Dunn, David Henry Hwang, Lonny Kaneko, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, David Wong Louie, Darrell Lum, Wing Tek Lum, Toshio Mori, Bharati Mukherjee, Fae Myenne Ng, Bienvenido Santos, Monica Sone, Amy Tan, Yoshiko Uchida, Shawn Wong, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Wakako Yamauchi.
Author: Bella Adams Publisher: Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 0748629831 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
This critical study of Asian American literature discusses work by internationally successful writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Bharati Mukherjee, Amy Tan and others in their historical, cultural and critical contexts. The focus of the book is on contemporary writing, from the 1970s onwards, although it also traces over a hundred years of Asian American literary production in prose, poetry, drama and criticism. The main body of the book comprises five periodized chapters that highlight important events in a nation-state that has historically rendered Asian Americans invisible. Of particular importance to the writers selected for case studies are questions of racial identity, cultural history and literary value with respect to dominant American ideologies.
Author: Elaine Kim Publisher: Temple University Press ISBN: 0877223521 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
An introduction to the literary works of Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Filipino-Americans, and Korean-Americans, this book focuses on the self-images and social contexts of the nineteenth-century immigrants, their descendants, and the Americanized writers of today.Although the book examines the novels, autobiographies, poems, and plays themselves, the social history of Asians in American is a significant backdrop-as Maxine Hong Kingston herself argues it should be. These racially distinctive Americans have confronted in their lives and writings American stereotypes of the "Oriental," racial discrimination, and the cultural gulf between East and West.After a chapter on Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, and other Anglo-American caricatures of Asians, the author turns to a discussion of the first immigrant writers, many of whom were educated aristocrats playing the role of cultural ambassadors, and then to the less privileged, more socially critical generations of writers who followed.From works like Flower Drum Song, Eat a Bowl of Tea, The Woman Warrior, China Men, and a host of lesser-known writings, the author shows how portrayals of Chinatown, the Japanese-American family, and the roles of all the Asian-American women and men have changed. Drawing on her personal interviews with Asian-American writers, Kim also conveys their attitudes towards their own group, other Asian-Americans, other racial minorities, and white Americans-a complex mix of bitterness, acceptance, and militance. Author note: Elaine H. Kim is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She directs the Korean Community Center of Oakland and Asian Women United (California).
Author: Christopher Lee Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804783705 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identityargues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity. Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject," which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. He reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge. Harnessing Theodor Adorno's notion of aesthetic semblance, Lee offers an alternative account of identity as a figure akin to modern artwork. Like art, Lee argues, identity provides access to imagined worlds that in turn wage a critique of ongoing histories and realities of racialization. This book assembles a transnational archive of literary texts by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa, revealing the intersections of subjectivity and representation, and drawing our attention to their limits.
Author: Xiaojing Zhou Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 0295805420 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 345
Book Description
Asian American literature abounds with complex depictions of American cities as spaces that reinforce racial segregation and prevent interactions across boundaries of race, culture, class, and gender. However, in Cities of Others, Xiaojing Zhou uncovers a much different narrative, providing the most comprehensive examination to date of how Asian American writers - both celebrated and overlooked - depict urban settings. Zhou goes beyond examining popular portrayals of Chinatowns by paying equal attention to life in other parts of the city. Her innovative and wide-ranging approach sheds new light on the works of Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese American writers who bear witness to a variety of urban experiences and reimagine the American city as other than a segregated nation-space. Drawing on critical theories on space from urban geography, ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies, Zhou shows how spatial organization shapes identity in the works of Sui Sin Far, Bienvenido Santos, Meena Alexander, Frank Chin, Chang-rae Lee, Karen Tei Yamashita, and others. She also shows how the everyday practices of Asian American communities challenge racial segregation, reshape urban spaces, and redefine the identity of the American city. From a reimagining of the nineteenth-century flaneur figure in an Asian American context to providing a framework that allows readers to see ethnic enclaves and American cities as mutually constitutive and transformative, Zhou gives us a provocative new way to understand some of the most important works of Asian American literature.
Author: Betsy Huang Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1108911293 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
This volume examines the concerns of Asian American literature from 1996 to the present. This period was not only marked by civil unrest, terror and militarization, economic depression, and environmental abuse, but also unprecedented growth and visibility of Asian American literature. This volume is divided into four sections that plots the trajectories of, and tensions between, social challenges and literary advances. Part One tracks how Asian American literary productions of this period reckon with the effects of structures and networks of violence. Part Two tracks modes of intimacy – desires, loves, close friendships, romances, sexual relations, erotic contacts – that emerge in the face of neoimperialism, neoliberalism, and necropolitics. Part Three traces the proliferation of genres in Asian American writing of the past quarter century in new and in well-worn terrains. Part Four surveys literary projects that speculate on future states of Asian America in domestic and global contexts.
Author: Lorna Fitzsimmons Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134676786 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 327
Book Description
This book is a ground-breaking transnational study of representations of the environment in Asian American literature. Extending and renewing Asian American studies and ecocriticism by drawing the two fields into deeper dialogue, it brings Asian American writers to the center of ecocritical studies. This collection demonstrates the distinctiveness of Asian American writers’ positions on topics of major concern today: environmental justice, identity and the land, war environments, consumption, urban environments, and the environment and creativity. Represented authors include Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ruth Ozeki, Ha Jin, Fae Myenne Ng, Le Ly Hayslip, Lan Cao, Mitsuye Yamada, Lawson Fusao Inada, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Milton Murayama, Don Lee, and Hisaye Yamamoto. These writers provide a range of perspectives on the historical, social, psychological, economic, philosophical, and aesthetic responses of Asian Americans to the environment conceived in relation to labor, racism, immigration, domesticity, global capitalism, relocation, pollution, violence, and religion. Contributors apply a diversity of critical frameworks, including critical radical race studies, counter-memory studies, ecofeminism, and geomantic criticism. The book presents a compelling and timely "green" perspective through which to understand key works of Asian American literature and leads the field of ecocriticism into neglected terrain.
Author: Guiyou Huang
Author: Sau-ling Cynthia Wong
Author: Crystal Parikh
Author: Bella Adams
Author: Elaine Kim
Author: Christopher Lee
Author: Xiaojing Zhou
Author: Betsy Huang
Author: King-Kok Cheung
Author: Lorna Fitzsimmons