Tropic of Orange

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

Get Book Here

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

Tropic of Orange

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

Get Book Here

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

Tropic of Orange

Tropic of Orange PDF Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566895022
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Fiercely satirical. . . . Yamashita presents [an] intricate plot with mordant wit." —New York Times Book Review "A stunner. . . . An exquisite mystery novel. But this is a novel of dystopia and apocalypse; the mystery concerns the tragic flaws of human nature." —Library Journal (starred review) "Brilliant. . . . An ingenious interpretation of social woes." —Booklist (starred review) "Yamashita handles her eccentrics and the setting of their adventures with panache. David Foster Wallace meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez." —Publishers Weekly Irreverently juggling magical realism, film noir, hip hop, and chicanismo, Tropic of Orange takes place in a Los Angeles where the homeless, gangsters, infant organ entrepreneurs, and Hollywood collide on a stretch of the Harbor Freeway. Hemmed in by wildfires, it's a symphony conducted from an overpass, grandiose, comic, and as diverse as the city itself. 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.

Transnational Asian American Literature

Transnational Asian American Literature PDF Author: Shirley Lim
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781592134519
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examines the diasporic and transnational aspects of Asian-American literature and engages works of prose and poetry as aesthetic articulations of the fluid transnational identities formed by Asian-American writers.

Asian North American Identities

Asian North American Identities PDF Author: Eleanor Ty
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253110916
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
The nine essays in Asian North American Identities explore how Asian North Americans are no longer caught between worlds of the old and the new, the east and the west, and the south and the north. Moving beyond national and diasporic models of ethnic identity to focus on the individual feelings and experiences of those who are not part of a dominant white majority, the essays collected here draw from a wide range of sources, including novels, art, photography, poetry, cinema, theatre, and popular culture. The book illustrates how Asian North Americans are developing new ways of seeing and thinking about themselves by eluding imposed identities and creating spaces that offer alternative sites from which to speak and imagine. Contributors are Jeanne Yu-Mei Chiu, Patricia Chu, Rocio G. Davis, Donald C. Goellnicht, Karlyn Koh, Josephine Lee, Leilani Nishime, Caroline Rody, Jeffrey J. Santa Ana, Malini Johar Schueller, and Eleanor Ty.

LatinAsian Cartographies

LatinAsian Cartographies PDF Author: Susan Thananopavarn
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813589886
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Get Book Here

Book Description
LatinAsian Cartographies examines how Latina/o and Asian American writers provide important counter-narratives to the stories of racial encroachment that have come to characterize twenty-first century dominant discourses on race. Susan Thananopavarn contends that the Asian American and Latina/o presence in the United States, although often considered marginal in discourses of American history and nationhood, is in fact crucial to understanding how national identity has been constructed historically and continues to be constructed in the present day. Thananopavarn creates a new “LatinAsian” view of the United States that emphasizes previously suppressed aspects of national history, including imperialism, domestic racism during World War II, Cold War operations in Latin America and Asia, and the politics of borders in an age of globalization. LatinAsian Cartographies ultimately reimagines national narratives in a way that transforms dominant ideas of what it means to be American.

Brave New Words

Brave New Words PDF Author: Elizabeth Ammons
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587299224
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book Here

Book Description
The activist tradition in American literature has long testified to the power of words to change people and the power of people to change the world, yet in recent years many professional humanists have chosen to distract themselves with a postmodern fundamentalism of indeterminacy and instability rather than engage with social and political issues. Throughout her bold and provocative call to action, Elizabeth Ammons argues that the responsibility now facing humanists is urgent: inside and outside academic settings, they need to revive the liberal arts as a progressive cultural force that offers workable ideas and inspiration in the real-world struggle to achieve social and environmental justice. Brave New Words challenges present and future literary scholars and teachers to look beyond mere literary critique toward the concrete issue of social change and how to achieve it. Calling for a profound realignment of thought and spirit in the service of positive social change, Ammons argues for the continued importance of multiculturalism in the twenty-first century despite attacks on the concept from both right and left. Concentrating on activist U.S. writers—from ecocritics to feminists to those dedicated to exposing race and class biases, from Jim Wallis and Cornel West to Winona LaDuke and Paula Moya and many others—she calls for all humanists to link their work to the progressive literature of the last half century, to insist on activism in the service of positive change as part of their mission, and to teach the power of hope and action to their students. As Ammons clearly demonstrates, much of American literature was written to expose injustice and motivate readers to work for social transformation. She challenges today’s academic humanists to address the issues of hope and purpose by creating a practical activist pedagogy that gives students the knowledge to connect their theoretical learning to the outside world. By relying on the transformative power of literature and replacing nihilism and powerlessness with conviction and faith, the liberal arts can offer practical, useful inspiration to everyone seeking to create a better world.

Transnational Crossroads

Transnational Crossroads PDF Author: Camilla Fojas
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803240880
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 493

Get Book Here

Book Description
The twentieth century was a time of unprecedented migration and interaction for Asian, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultures in the Americas and the American Pacific. Some of these ethnic groups already had historic ties, but technology, migration, and globalization during the twentieth century brought them into even closer contact. Transnational Crossroads explores and triangulates for the first time the interactions and contacts among these three cultural groups that were brought together by the expanding American empire from 1867 to 1950. Through a comparative framework, this volume weaves together narratives of U.S. and Spanish empire, globalization, resistance, and identity, as well as social, labor, and political movements. Contributors examine multiethnic celebrities and key figures, migratory paths, cultural productions, and social and political formations among these three groups. Engaging multiple disciplines and methodologies, these studies of Asian American, Latin American, and Pacific Islander cultural interactions explode traditional notions of ethnic studies and introduce new approaches to transnational and comparative studies of the Americas and the American Pacific.

After Critique

After Critique PDF Author: Mitchum Huehls
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190613858
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Periodizing contemporary fiction against the backdrop of neoliberalism, After Critique identifies a notable turn away from progressive politics among a cadre of key twenty-first-century authors. Through authoritative readings of foundational texts from writers such as Percival Everett, Helena Viramontes, Uzodinma Iweala, Colson Whitehead, Tom McCarthy, and David Foster Wallace, Huehls charts a distinct move away from standard forms of political critique grounded in rights discourse, ideological demystification, and the identification of injustice and inequality. The authors discussed in After Critique register the decline of a conventional leftist politics, and in many ways even capitulate to its demise. As Huehls explains, however, such capitulation should actually be understood as contemporary U.S. fiction's concerted attempt to reconfigure the nature of politics from within the neoliberal beast. While it's easy to dismiss this as post-ideological fantasy, Huehls draws on an array of diverse scholarship--most notably the work of Bruno Latour--to suggest that an entirely new form of politics is emerging, both because of and in response to neoliberalism. Arguing that we must stop thinking of neoliberalism as a set of norms, ideological beliefs, or market principles that can be countered with a more just set of norms, beliefs, and principles, Huehls instead insists that we must start to appreciate neoliberalism as a post-normative ontological phenomenon. That is, it's not something that requires us to think or act a certain way; it's something that requires us to be in and occupy space in a certain way. This provocative treatment of neoliberalism in turn allows After Critique to reimagine our understanding of contemporary fiction and the political possibilities it envisions.

Uncertain Mirrors

Uncertain Mirrors PDF Author: Jesús Benito
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9042026014
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
Uncertain Mirrors realigns magical realism within a changing critical landscape, from Aristotelian mimesis to Adorno’s concept of negative dialectics. In between, the volume traverses a vast theoretical arena, from postmodernism and postcolonialism to Lévinasian philosophy and eco-criticism. The volume opens and closes with dialectical instability, as it recasts the mutability of the term “mimesis” as both a “world-reflecting” and a “world-creating” mechanism. Magical realism, the authors contend, offers another stance of the possible; it also situates the reader at a hybrid aesthetic matrix inextricably linked to postcolonial theory, postmodernism, Bakhtinian theory, and quantum physics. As Uncertain Mirrors explores, magical realist texts partake of modernist exhaustion as much as of postmodernist replenishment, yet they stem from a different “location of culture” and “direction of culture;” they offer complex aesthetic artifacts that, in their recreation of alternative geographic and semiotic spaces, dislocate hegemonic texts and ideologies. Their unrealistic excess effects a breach in the totalized unity represented by 19th century realism, and plays the dissonant chord of the particular and the non-identical.

Civil Racism

Civil Racism PDF Author: Lynn Mie Itagaki
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452950156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 443

Get Book Here

Book Description
The 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, also known as the Rodney King riots, followed the acquittal of four police officers who had been charged with assault and the use of excessive force against a Black motorist. The violence included widespread looting and destruction of stores, many of which were owned or operated by Korean Americans in neighborhoods that were predominantly Black and Latina/o. Civil Racism examines a range of cultural reactions to the “riots” anchored by calls for a racist civility, a central component of the aesthetics and politics of the post–civil rights era. Lynn Mie Itagaki argues that the rebellion interrupted the rhetoric of “civil racism,” which she defines as the preservation of civility at the expense of racial equality. As an expression of structural racism, Itagaki writes, civil racism exhibits the active—though often unintentional—perpetuation of discrimination through one’s everyday engagement with the state and society. She is particularly interested in how civility manifests in societal institutions such as the family, the school, and the neighborhood, and she investigates dramatic, filmic, and literary texts by African American, Asian American, and Latina/o artists and writers that contest these demands for a racist civility. Itagaki specifically addresses what she sees as two “blind spots” in society and in scholarship. One is the invisibility of Asians and Latinas/os in media coverage and popular culture that, she posits, importantly shapes Black–White racial formations in dominant mainstream discourses about race. The second is the scholarly separation of two critical traditions that should be joined in analyses of racial injustice and the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion: comparative race studies and feminist theories. Civil Racism insists that the 1992 “riots” continue to matter, that the artistic responses matter, and that—more than twenty years later—debates about issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender are more urgent than ever.