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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Race and Ethnicity

Virginia Commonwealth University

Journal

2001

Asian American

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

From Chinatown To Gunga Din Highway: Notes On Frank Chin's Writing Strategy, Juan E. San Jr Jan 2001

From Chinatown To Gunga Din Highway: Notes On Frank Chin's Writing Strategy, Juan E. San Jr

Ethnic Studies Review

Exploring Frank Chin's work, particularly in his latest novel Gunga Din Highway, the essay endeavors to re-situate ethnic writing in the historical specificity of its inscription in the United States as a racial polity. This cognitive remapping of the literary field as reconfigured by multiculturalist liberalism may be accomplished by examining Chin's cultural politics. Chin's mode of strategic writing interrogates the modelminority myth and the premises of cultural nationalism. While it rejects the pluralist resolution of the traditional conflicts in the Chinese diaspora, Chin's satiric impulse proposes a defamiliarization of Asian American "common sense" adequate to provoke a revaluation of …


[Review Of] David Leiwei Li, Imagining The Nation: Asian American Literature And Cultural Consent, Phillipa Kafka Jan 2001

[Review Of] David Leiwei Li, Imagining The Nation: Asian American Literature And Cultural Consent, Phillipa Kafka

Ethnic Studies Review

Whenever "the nation" is "imagined," Americans of Asian ancestry are excluded by common "cultural consent" as alien/alienated "Others," as citizens of their ancestral nations. Due to recent immigration from many Asian nations, the globalization of economies, including the Pacific Rim, and especially the efforts of some Asian American writers, the situation has improved--somewhat. Still, if Asian-American writers stress the American in their representations, they are denying the Asian. If they stress the Asian, they have bought into American "cultural consent" its racist representations of Asian-Americans. Further, they themselves can't help but think within "the nation's" ongoing restrictive racist "cultural consent" …