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Introduction To Volume Ten: Aiiieeeee! At 45, Tara Fickle, Wei Ming Dariotis

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

The editors of the special issue on Aiiieeeee! locate the seminal anthology within the history of Asian American literature as a scholarly discipline and contextualize contributor's responses to the personal and cumulative effects of Aiiieeeee! on the Asian American literary landscape.

Book Review: Palaces For The People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, And The Decline Of Civic Life, Eric Klinenberg, Georgia Westbrook

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Review: Bury What We Cannot Take By Kirstin Chen, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Review: The Incendiaries By R.O. Kwon, Jessie Fussell

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A book review of R.O. Kwon's 2018 debut novel, The Incendiaries.

Introduction To Volume Nine: Homecoming, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Making (Non)Sense: On Ruth Ozeki's A Tale For The Time Being, Yana Ya-Chu Chang

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay investigates the knowledge produced around Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being through a discussion of its marketing processes and its reception, as well as through textual analysis. I first draw upon Sau-ling Wong’s observations about the problem of a US-centric referential framework in the internationalization of Asian American studies to examine a Western-centric framing in the marketing strategies of the US/Canada and the UK editions of Ozeki’s novel. Next, I turn to an examination of how reviews and selected readers’ responses to Ozeki’s novel show an at-times incoherent process of making sense of this …

Mobilizing The Vietnamese Body: Dance Theory, Critical Refugee Studies, And The Aftermaths Of War In Andrew X. Pham’S Catfish And Mandala, Quynh Nhu Le, Ying Zhu

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Mobilizing the Vietnamese Body: Dance Theory, Critical Refugee Studies, and the Aftermaths of War in Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala

Through analysis of Andrew X. Pham’s Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, this collaboration between a literary scholar and dance scholar joins methodologies from their respective fields to explore the politicized dimensions of the Vietnamese body-in-motion. Published in 1999, Pham's memoir documents his journey, as a Vietnamese refugee living in the U.S., as he travels throughout Vietnam on a bicycle. We argue that through the literal and theoretical mobilization of his …

Integration Of Local Poetic Voices: An Interview With Lawson Fusao Inada, Alma Rosa Alvarez, John Rafael Almaguer

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

An interview with Lawson Fusoa Inada

Viet Thanh Nguyen In Conversation With Andrew Lam

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Cover Of Volume 9, Sung Yu

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Review: A River Of Stars By Vanessa Hua, Olivia Lee

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A review of Vanessa Hua's 2018 novel, A River of Stars.

Review: Swimming In Hong Kong, Stephanie Chan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A review of Swimming in Hong Kong (2016), a short story collection by Stephanie Han.

“‘Relentless Geography’: Los Angeles’ Imagined Cartographies In Karen Tei Yamashita’S Tropic Of Orange,”, Cristina M. Rodriguez

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

What would a map of Los Angeles drawn from the ground up look like? In his groundbreaking work The Production of Space (1974), Henri Lefebvre argues that the conceived space of urban planners is fundamentally distinct from lived space, which cannot be mapped out. In her impressive city-wide narrative, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) demonstrates the effects of imposing conceived space upon the lived space of inner city Los Angeles residents, and what happens when the counter-model of space being lived by a city’s inhabitants rebels. Yamashita’s text mirrors this disjuncture between represented and lived space through the …

Why Are The Children Dying?: Mixed-Race Children In Chang-Rae Lee’S First Five Novels, Holly E. Martin

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

The mixed-race children in each of Lee’s first five novels constitute an overarching set of symbols, reflecting, at first, society’s intolerance of miscegenation and its resulting mixed offspring, as demonstrated in the dysfunctional behaviors of the parent(s) (or society) and the death or disappearance of the mixed-race child. Then, later in the novel, a second mixed-race child’s birth, or its impending birth, signifies an acquired racial awareness on the part of the parent(s) and an overcoming of trauma that leads to hope for a more tolerant and understanding social environment for the mixed-race child.

An Unfinished Conversation: An Interview With Yiyun Li, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

An interview of fiction writer and memoirist Yiyun LI.

Introduction To Volume Eight: Wins And Losses, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Walking And Wandering: Reconstructing Diasporic Subjectivity In T. C. Huo's Land Of Smiles And Lê Thi Diem Thúy’S The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Brian G. Chen

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Diaspora has often been defined as the condition of dispersal and displacement in which its members express minimal connections with their host country and always look to return to their ancestral homelands. However, from the literary representations in T. C. Huo’s Land of Smiles and Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, it is clear that members of the Southeast Asian diaspora determine to set root in their host country and refuse to be treated as temporary guests. This determination is warranted by their desire to redefine the contentious idea of home beyond cultural ancestry …

Rotten Bananas, Hip Hop Heads, And The American Individual: Teaching Eddie Huang’S Memoir Fresh Off The Boat And Its Tropes Of Literacy, Wilson C. Chen

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This essay focuses on Fresh Off the Boat as an eminently teachable coming-of-age story, provides critical contexts and directions for teaching this ideologically suggestive text, and sets forth the interpretive argument that the structures and themes of the memoir are fundamentally shaped by the literacy narrative at its core. As such, the text enters into conversation with other literacy narratives that have become so foundational in the teaching of multiethnic literature in the U.S. Moreover, Huang’s tropes of literacy draw from enduring, mythified Americanist discourses that are suggestive of a masculine individualism that, while not unique, is recognizable, instructive, and …

"It's Oil And Water": Race, Gender, Power, And Trauma In Vu Tran's Dragonfish, Quan-Manh Ha, Chase Greenfield

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes in-depth the interplay between race, gender, power, and trauma in Vu Tran’s debut novel, Dragonfish. We argue that Dragonfish focuses on the relationships, desires, and conflicts among its three protagonists—Robert, Suzy, and Sonny—to highlight how their postwar interactions complicate race, gender, trauma, and remembrance. The three protagonists engage in an intense socio-political struggle for dominance and control, which is riddled with irony, heart-wrenching pain, and misleading appearances. They experience hardship and loss, but they rely on each other for recovery from past and present trauma, and to advance their own varying personal priorities and agendas: …

Volume 8 Cover, Joanne Lamb

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Speaking And Mourning: Working Through Identity And Language In Chang-Rae Lee’S Native Speaker, Matthew L. Miller

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In my essay entitled “Speaking and Mourning: Working Through Identity and Language in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” I argue that the novel’s protagonist Henry Park finds himself at a critical juncture in his life at the novel’s beginning. I analyze the protagonist’s relationship to language acquisition and identity, which have been developed by Lee to be associated as traumas. Furthermore, these topics are complicated by the death of his son, Mitt. This loss is a trauma of the heart and of the self for the main character who sees a successful navigation of language and immigration lost by his …

Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Gina Apostol creates multiple tensions reflecting the relationship between the United States and the Philippines and among different linguistic codes. Languages mix throughout the text, set in the Marcos Era Philippines, as symbols of fluidity and disorientation. Other characters’ frequent complex linguistic mix proves alienating for protagonist and narrator Soledad Soliman. Apostol renders Soledad as a young girl disoriented by her inability to competently use native Filipino languages because she spent most of her childhood in the United States and simultaneously traumatized by her role as the daughter of a member of former President Ferdinand …

The Author As The Novel Self: Shirley Lim’S Sister Swing, Denise B. Dillon

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

While authorial omniscience is denied the biographer, I argue that Lim as novelist takes this advantage in Sister Swing as a tool through which to explore the development of self-identity through characterizations of three sisters that in combination form the tripartite self as proposed by Freud. Autobiographical memories of familial, social and cultural life experiences are the source from which Lim draws and fleshes out, in her novel, portrayals of family members seeking freedom through different ways and means. As a self-analyst probing deep within the psyche, Lim employs linguistic stylizations to express contrastive and yet complementary points of view …

Movement And Mobility: Representing Trauma Through Graphic Narratives, Stella Oh

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

The formal and stylistic movements found within the comic architecture of From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride interrogate the ways in which the visual and textual narrative can represent the emotional landscape of trauma and displacement through comics language. Engaging in a visual and textual critique of the global economy that trades in feminine identities, these graphic narratives interrogate the mobility and visibility of those who are trafficked. In these works, transnationalism is artistically embedded in consumptive practices of reading and seeing that reinforce or challenge Orientalist cultural assumptions about the Asian female body. Geographical movements of …

Rehistoricizing Differently, Differently: American Literary Globalism And Disruptions Of Neo-Colonial Discourse In Tropic Of Orange And Dogeaters, Patrick S. Lawrence

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Through a comparative reading of two important transnational Asian American texts, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, I argue that multiplicity of narration may, but does not always, resist the imposition of culturally dominant aesthetic modes, especially historical and nationalist narratives and multiculturalism. While Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange delegates narrative power to seven characters, it ultimately stages an ambiguous clash of discourses with a multiculturalist historicizing voice that is limited by its own contradictory impulses to control and containment. The novel dialogizes its excessive tendencies by scripting plural-but-discrete identities. In contrast, Jessica …

On Such A Full Sea Of Novels: An Interview With Chang-Rae Lee, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

An interview with author Chang-rae Lee.

Introduction To Volume Seven: Confessing Racial Schizophrenia, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

A short meditation on teaching ethnic American literature in 2016, acknowledgments, and a summary of this volume's contents.

Volume 7 Cover, David Burnett

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Loving The Unlovable Body In Yamanaka's Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s award-winning yet remarkably neglected Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993) explores female adolescence and coming of age in a rich, polyphonic collection of verse novellas. “Loving the Unlovable Body” focuses on Yamanaka’s treatment of this transition as a fully embodied, fraught, and often painful experience by expicating the uses of several tropes used to express girls’ experiences of their bodies: eating, voice, eyes, fragmentation, and marking/naming. These metaphors contribute to the development of a complex range of possibilities from devastating to hopeful, presented in juxtaposition and interplay, for girls’ relationships to their culturally denigrated bodies and the …

“Yellow Crowfoot In The Pond,/Not Lotus, Not Lily”: Mapping The River, Mapping Voices, Pamela J. Rader

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This paper examines the prosody of Chin’s eponymous poem, "The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty," through an eco-critical lens. While it does not dismiss the hybrid cultural influences of the poem, it focuses on the ways the non-human agents, or the figures in the poem’s landscape, “speak.” Poetry, like the poem’s terraced gardens, traces tension between the controlling human forces experienced by the narrating female I personas and the natural world’s affective inclinations.