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Articles 61 - 90 of 100

Full-Text Articles in American Studies

Confession, Hybridity, And Language In Gina Apostol’S Gun Dealers’ Daughter, Cecilia Nina Myers Sep 2016

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 Sep 2016

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 Sep 2016

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 Sep 2016

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 Sep 2016

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 Sep 2016

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 Sep 2016

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 Sep 2016

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 …


Domestic Violence In Lac Su’S I Love Yous Are For White People: A Sociological Criticism Approach, Quan-Manh Ha Jan 2016

Domestic Violence In Lac Su’S I Love Yous Are For White People: A Sociological Criticism Approach, Quan-Manh Ha

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This article employs sociological criticism to examine domestic violence, parenting, and communication behavior in Lac Su’s Vietnamese American memoir. The book debunks the seemingly positive myth of Asian Americans as a model minority, substantiates certain negative stereotypes of Asian men, and challenges some of the classic Asian values that apparently have shaped the Asian American identity. I argue that Su’s memoir is a critique of structural inequalities, urban poverty, unemployment, inaccessibility to a support network, and the intersection between class, gender, and race in the contexts of war and its aftermath.


“Yellow Crowfoot In The Pond,/Not Lotus, Not Lily”: Mapping The River, Mapping Voices, Pamela J. Rader Jan 2016

“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.


Dying To Better Themselves: West Indians And The Building Of The Panama Canal, Written By Olive Senior, Michael L. Conniff Jan 2016

Dying To Better Themselves: West Indians And The Building Of The Panama Canal, Written By Olive Senior, Michael L. Conniff

Faculty Publications, History

A book review of Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, by Olive Senior. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2014. xxiii + 416 pp. (Paper US$ 40.00)


Review Of Pioneer Girl, By Bich Minh Nguyen, Quan-Manh Ha Aug 2015

Review Of Pioneer Girl, By Bich Minh Nguyen, Quan-Manh Ha

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

DNA


Fictional And Fragmented Truths In Korean Adoptee Life Writing, Jenny Heijun Wills Aug 2015

Fictional And Fragmented Truths In Korean Adoptee Life Writing, Jenny Heijun Wills

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This article explores the ways that life writing allows transnational, transracial Asian adoptee authors to navigate their complex experiences of truth and authenticity. It also addresses the transformations adoptee authors make to the memoir genre in order to accommodate the particularities of their experiences. I analyze Jane Jeong Trenka’s foundational Asian adoption memoir, The Language of Blood, and Kim Sunée’s lesser-known text, Trail of Crumbs, paying attention to the ways that the authors’ hybridized and deliberately constructionist approaches to genre parallel some of the identity issues that are brought out in their respective books. I explore the significance …


“’Chinese Don’T Drink Coffee!’”: Coffee And Class Liminality In Elaine Mar’S Paper Daughter, Christian Aguiar Aug 2015

“’Chinese Don’T Drink Coffee!’”: Coffee And Class Liminality In Elaine Mar’S Paper Daughter, Christian Aguiar

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

This article offers a reading of the foodservice spaces in Elaine Mar’s memoir Paper Daughter in order to suggest changes in the way we think about class liminality. It argues that by focusing not just on the way the socially-mobile narrator experiences liminality, but also on the ways her working-class parents and co-workers experience it, we can begin to consider some of the complexities and nuances the idea of the liminal offers. In so doing, the article suggests a slightly new approach to thinking about and teaching Paper Daughter.


From Raw To Cooked: Amy Tan’S “Fish Cheeks” Through A Lévi-Straussian Lens, Susan K. Kevra Aug 2015

From Raw To Cooked: Amy Tan’S “Fish Cheeks” Through A Lévi-Straussian Lens, Susan K. Kevra

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

In "Fish Cheeks" a scant 500 words short story, Amy Tan serves up a coming of age story about an Asian American teenage girl. Tan’s setting of Christmas for a traditional Chinese dinner, shared with the American boy on whom the protagonist, Amy, has a crush, emphasizes the girl’s dual identity as an Asian American, a reality she is confronting head on. Forced to see her family traditions through the eyes of a white, Christian boy, she finds those traditions distasteful. Rather than delighting in the dishes her mother has lovingly prepared, she is revolted by them, fixated instead on …


The Illegible Pan: Racial Formation, Hybridity, And Chinatown In Sui Sin Far’S “‘Its Wavering Image’”, Caroline Porter Aug 2015

The Illegible Pan: Racial Formation, Hybridity, And Chinatown In Sui Sin Far’S “‘Its Wavering Image’”, Caroline Porter

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Drawing upon Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, this article offers an interpretation of “‘Its Wavering Image’” that explains the biracial main character, Pan’s, process of racialization. The argument is two fold: first, the paper contends that in this story, Sui Sin Far theorizes that race is performative rather than biological. Race does not come from characters’ bodies, but is rather an incorporated performance of codes. Pan’s race, then, depends not on her parentage or her biology, but on the “codes” she internalizes and embodies, codes that are fleshed out throughout the article through historical contextualization of San Francisco and Chinatown. …


A “Monstress” Undertaking: An Interview With Lysley Tenorio, Noelle Brada-Williams Aug 2015

A “Monstress” Undertaking: An Interview With Lysley Tenorio, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.


Introduction To Volume Six: An Identity Rebus, Noelle Brada-Williams Aug 2015

Introduction To Volume Six: An Identity Rebus, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.


Volume 6 Cover, Mark P. Brada Aug 2015

Volume 6 Cover, Mark P. Brada

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.


On Popular Visual Culture And Asian American Literature: Interview With Professor Elaine Kim, Karen Chow Sep 2014

On Popular Visual Culture And Asian American Literature: Interview With Professor Elaine Kim, Karen Chow

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.


“Finding” Guam: Distant Epistemologies And Cartographic Pedagogies, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials Sep 2014

“Finding” Guam: Distant Epistemologies And Cartographic Pedagogies, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.


Introduction: On Contemporary Asian American Literature And Popular Visual Culture, Pamela Thoma Sep 2014

Introduction: On Contemporary Asian American Literature And Popular Visual Culture, Pamela Thoma

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.


Remapping Chinatown On The Diagonal: Frances Chung’S Crazy Melon, Anastasia Wright Turner Sep 2014

Remapping Chinatown On The Diagonal: Frances Chung’S Crazy Melon, Anastasia Wright Turner

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.


Disorienting The Vietnam War: Gb Tran’S Vietnamerica As Transnational And Transhistorical Graphic Memoir, Caroline Kyungah Hong Sep 2014

Disorienting The Vietnam War: Gb Tran’S Vietnamerica As Transnational And Transhistorical Graphic Memoir, Caroline Kyungah Hong

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.


Graphic Self-Consciousness, Travel Narratives, And The Asian American Studies Classroom: Delisle’S Burma Chronicles And Guibert, Lefèvre, And Lemercier’S The Photographer, Monica Chiu Sep 2014

Graphic Self-Consciousness, Travel Narratives, And The Asian American Studies Classroom: Delisle’S Burma Chronicles And Guibert, Lefèvre, And Lemercier’S The Photographer, Monica Chiu

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.


Teaching With Collaborative Writing Projects: Creating An Online Reader’S Guide To Karen Tei Yamashita’S I Hotel, Grace Talusan Sep 2014

Teaching With Collaborative Writing Projects: Creating An Online Reader’S Guide To Karen Tei Yamashita’S I Hotel, Grace Talusan

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.


“Capturing The Spirit”: Teaching Karen Tei Yamashita’S I Hotel, Lai Ying Yu Sep 2014

“Capturing The Spirit”: Teaching Karen Tei Yamashita’S I Hotel, Lai Ying Yu

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.


How The West Was Lost, Ashish Chand May 2013

How The West Was Lost, Ashish Chand

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

No abstract provided.


Review Of Capote’S In Cold Blood, Yevgeniy Mayba May 2013

Review Of Capote’S In Cold Blood, Yevgeniy Mayba

Themis: Research Journal of Justice Studies and Forensic Science

No abstract provided.


A Psychoanalytical Approach To Bich Minh Nguyen's Stealing Buddha's Dinner, Wenying Xu Oct 2011

A Psychoanalytical Approach To Bich Minh Nguyen's Stealing Buddha's Dinner, Wenying Xu

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

Racial minorities in the U.S. are often tormented by the tension between the corporeal and the ontological, with the former experienced as confining and the latter expansive. Such ambivalence often expresses itself in one's relationship with food. Here I propose to illustrate how Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical theory on desire can assist us in understanding ethnicity as a bodily performance, which I venture to call an embodied ontology, applying this concept to Bich Minh Nguyen's Stealing Buddha's Dinner (2007).