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Articles 61 - 90 of 94
Full-Text Articles in Asian American Studies
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
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
"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: …
Reframing The Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives In The Post-9/11 Period, Mai-Linh Hong
Reframing The Archive: Vietnamese Refugee Narratives In The Post-9/11 Period, Mai-Linh Hong
Faculty Journal Articles
This article considers how recent narratives about Vietnamese refugees engage with the Vietnam War’s visual archive, particularly iconic photographs from the war and ensuing “boat people” crisis, and contribute to present-day discourses on American militarism and immigration. The article focuses on two texts, a National Public Radio special series about a US naval ship (2010) and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again (2011), which recounts a Vietnamese child’s refugee passage. By refiguring famous photojournalistic images from the war, the radio series advances a familiar rescue-and-gratitude narrative in which the US military operates as a care apparatus, exemplifying a cultural …
Speaking And Mourning: Working Through Identity And Language In Chang-Rae Lee’S Native Speaker, Matthew L. Miller
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Volume 7 Cover, David Burnett
Volume 7 Cover, David Burnett
Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
No abstract provided.
Introduction To Volume Seven: Confessing Racial Schizophrenia, Noelle Brada-Williams
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.
Loving The Unlovable Body In Yamanaka's Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada
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 …
Animate Impossibilities: On Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, And The Humanities, Frances H. Tran
Animate Impossibilities: On Asian Americanist Critique, Racialization, And The Humanities, Frances H. Tran
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
This dissertation works from and through the field of Asian American studies, drawing on Asian Americanist cultural critique and minority discourse, to investigate the relationship among race, the politics of knowledge, and the epistemic function of the humanities. Proliferating discourses on “post-race” and “colorblindness” characterizing the present moment posit a progressive movement beyond racial division, towards recognizing and incorporating minority difference into the academy. However, even as issues like “diversity” have gained visibility as institutional objectives, I contend that this heightened visibility occludes the structural conditions that allow racialization to persist. In this project, I follow the work of thinkers …
Loving The Unlovable Body In Lois Ann Yamanaka’S Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada
Loving The Unlovable Body In Lois Ann Yamanaka’S Saturday Night At The Pahala Theatre, Christa Baiada
Publications and Research
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 explicating 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
“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.
Review Of Pioneer Girl, By Bich Minh Nguyen, Quan-Manh Ha
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
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
“’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
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
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
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
Introduction To Volume Six: An Identity Rebus, Noelle Brada-Williams
Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
No abstract provided.
Volume 6 Cover, Mark P. Brada
Volume 6 Cover, Mark P. Brada
Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
No abstract provided.
“Capturing The Spirit”: Teaching Karen Tei Yamashita’S I Hotel, Lai Ying Yu
“Capturing The Spirit”: Teaching Karen Tei Yamashita’S I Hotel, Lai Ying Yu
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
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
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.
Remapping Chinatown On The Diagonal: Frances Chung’S Crazy Melon, Anastasia Wright Turner
Remapping Chinatown On The Diagonal: Frances Chung’S Crazy Melon, Anastasia Wright Turner
Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
No abstract provided.
Introduction: On Contemporary Asian American Literature And Popular Visual Culture, Pamela Thoma
Introduction: On Contemporary Asian American Literature And Popular Visual Culture, Pamela Thoma
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
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.