Beyond Literary Chinatown

Beyond Literary Chinatown PDF Author: Jeffrey F. L. Partridge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
American Book Award Winner (Before Columbus Foundation) The phenomenon of "literary Chinatown"--the ghettoization of Chinese American literature--was produced by the same dynamics of race and representation that ghettoized the Chinese American community into literal Chinatowns. In a 1982 response to reviews of Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston pinpointed the crux of the matter: "How dare they make their ignorance our inscrutability!" Jeffrey F. L. Partridge examines the dynamic relationship between reader expectations of Chinese American literature and the challenges to these expectations posed by recent Chinese American texts, challenges that push our understanding of a multicultural society to new horizons. Partridge builds on the concept of a "reading horizon"--a set of expectations and assumptions that a reader brings to a text--to explore the crucial interplay between reader, author, and text. Arguing that authors like Kingston, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Shawn Wong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and David Wong Louie are aware of their readers' horizons and write to challenge those assumptions, Partridge demonstrates how their writings function as a potent medium of cultural transformation. With attentive readings not only of literary texts but also of book reviews and publishers' marketing materials, Partridge enables us to chart and to understand the changes in Chinese American literature and its reception in the past fifty years. In doing so, he threads a new path forward in the discussion of race and ethnicity in America, one that encompasses the historical valence of multiculturalism and the cross-fertilizing perspectives of postmodern hybridity theory while remaining cognizant of the persistence of racist and racialized thinking in contemporary American society. Beyond Literary Chinatown demonstrates how Chinese American literature has come to negotiate the tensions between the expression of ethnic identity and a resistance to racialization. This important contribution to the growing body of critical works on Asian American literature will be of interest to reception theorists and scholars of American ethnic studies and American literature.

Beyond Literary Chinatown

Beyond Literary Chinatown PDF Author: Jeffrey F. L. Partridge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
American Book Award Winner (Before Columbus Foundation) The phenomenon of "literary Chinatown"--the ghettoization of Chinese American literature--was produced by the same dynamics of race and representation that ghettoized the Chinese American community into literal Chinatowns. In a 1982 response to reviews of Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston pinpointed the crux of the matter: "How dare they make their ignorance our inscrutability!" Jeffrey F. L. Partridge examines the dynamic relationship between reader expectations of Chinese American literature and the challenges to these expectations posed by recent Chinese American texts, challenges that push our understanding of a multicultural society to new horizons. Partridge builds on the concept of a "reading horizon"--a set of expectations and assumptions that a reader brings to a text--to explore the crucial interplay between reader, author, and text. Arguing that authors like Kingston, Li-Young Lee, Gish Jen, Shawn Wong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and David Wong Louie are aware of their readers' horizons and write to challenge those assumptions, Partridge demonstrates how their writings function as a potent medium of cultural transformation. With attentive readings not only of literary texts but also of book reviews and publishers' marketing materials, Partridge enables us to chart and to understand the changes in Chinese American literature and its reception in the past fifty years. In doing so, he threads a new path forward in the discussion of race and ethnicity in America, one that encompasses the historical valence of multiculturalism and the cross-fertilizing perspectives of postmodern hybridity theory while remaining cognizant of the persistence of racist and racialized thinking in contemporary American society. Beyond Literary Chinatown demonstrates how Chinese American literature has come to negotiate the tensions between the expression of ethnic identity and a resistance to racialization. This important contribution to the growing body of critical works on Asian American literature will be of interest to reception theorists and scholars of American ethnic studies and American literature.

Beyond Chinatown

Beyond Chinatown PDF Author: Steven P. Erie
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804751407
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Examines the history of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, from its obscure 1920s-era origins, through the Colorado River Aqueduct and State Water Projects, to today's daunting mission of drought management, water quality, environmental stewardship, and post-9/11 supply security. Simultaneous.

Interior Chinatown

Interior Chinatown PDF Author: Charles Yu
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307907198
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • “A shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood” (Vanity Fair) and a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.

Complicating Constructions

Complicating Constructions PDF Author: David S. Goldstein
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295800747
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
This volume of collected essays offers truly multiethnic, historically comparative, and meta-theoretical readings of the literature and culture of the United States. Covering works by a diverse set of American authors - from Toni Morrison to Bret Harte - these essays provide a vital supplement to the critical literary canon, mapping a newly variegated terrain that refuses the distinction between “ethnic” and “nonethnic” literatures.

Racial Asymmetries

Racial Asymmetries PDF Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479800554
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts.a Racial Asymmetries aspecifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the authorOCOs ethnoracial makeup does not directly overlap with that of the storytelling perspective. a Through rigorous analysis of novels and short fiction, such as Sesshu FosterOCOsa Atomik Aztex, Sabina MurrayOCOsa A CarnivoreOCOs Inquiry aand Sigrid NunezOCOsa The Last of Her Kind, Sohn reveals how the construction of narrative perspective allows the Asian American writer a flexible aesthetic canvas upon which to engage issues of oppression and inequity, power and subjectivity, and the complicated construction of racial identity. Speaking to concerns running through postcolonial studies and American literature at large, a Racial Asymmetries aemploys an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds. a Stephen Hong Sohn ais Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. He is the co-editor ofa Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits."

Spatial Literary Studies in China

Spatial Literary Studies in China PDF Author: Ying Fang
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031039149
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Spatial Literary Studies in China explores the range of vibrant and innovative research being done in China today. Chinese scholars have been exploring spatially oriented literary criticism in two different and mutually reinforcing directions: the first has focused on the study of Western literature, especially U.S. and European texts and theory, and the second has examined Chinese cultures, texts, and spaces. This collection of essays demonstrates Chinese scholars’ insightful interpretation, evaluation, and innovative application of international spatial analyses, theories, and methodologies, as well as their inspiring exploration and reconstruction of distinctively Chinese critical and theoretical discourses. For the first time in English, the essays in this volume demonstrate the vitality of literary geography, geocriticism, and the spatial humanities in China in the twenty-first century.

Diasporic Representations

Diasporic Representations PDF Author: Pin-chia Feng
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643108311
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
In Diasporic Representations, author Pin-chia Feng examines the stratification of various diasporic subjectivities through close reading fiction by Chinese American women writers of different social and class backgrounds. Deploying a strategy of "attentive reading", Feng engages the intersecting issues of historicity, spatiality, and bodily imagination from diasporic and feminist perspectives to illuminate the dynamics of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in Chinese American novels in this transnational age. The authors studied include Diana Chang, Edith Eaton, Yan Geling, Nieh Hualing, Gish Jen, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Aimee Liu, Fae Myenne Ng, Sigrid Nunez, Han Suyin, and Amy Tan.

Asian-American Writers

Asian-American Writers PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1604134011
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Presents critical perspectives on the works of Asian-American writers, including Gish Jen, Cheng-rae Lee, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Transitive Cultures

Transitive Cultures PDF Author: Christopher B. Patterson
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813591872
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Winner of the 2020 Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize from the American Studies Association Texts written by Southeast Asian migrants have often been read, taught, and studied under the label of multicultural literature. But what if the ideology of multiculturalism—with its emphasis on authenticity and identifiable cultural difference—is precisely what this literature resists? Transitive Cultures offers a new perspective on transpacific Anglophone literature, revealing how these chameleonic writers enact a variety of hybrid, transnational identities and intimacies. Examining literature from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, as well as from Southeast Asian migrants in Canada, Hawaii, and the U.S. mainland, this book considers how these authors use English strategically, as a means for building interethnic alliances and critiquing ruling power structures in both Southeast Asia and North America. Uncovering a wealth of texts from queer migrants, those who resist ethnic stereotypes, and those who feel few ties to their ostensible homelands, Transitive Cultures challenges conventional expectations regarding diaspora and minority writers.

Cities of Others

Cities of Others PDF Author: Xiaojing Zhou
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805420
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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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.