Co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse
As research on and around Asian-American literature continues to flourish, this new title from Routledge answers the urgent need for an authoritative reference work to map its vast critical terrain. The collection will enable users to make sense of the rapidly growing, and ever more complex, corpus of scholarly literature which explores—among many others—dizzying questions about racial diversity and identity, cultural history, and literary value.
The collection is organized into four volumes. The first volume (‘Literary History: Criticism and Theory’) brings together the best work to define, explicitly or implicitly, the parameters of Asian-American literature. It addresses its political and aesthetic significance and major issues of contention. Volume II (‘Prose: Fiction and Non-Fiction’) brings together the best interpretive work and practical criticism on key works of Asian-American literature, both fictive and factual. Volume III (‘Poetry’) assembles the essential scholarship on Asian-American poetry, while the final volume in the collection (‘Drama and Performance’) collects the vital research on theatrical texts and performance pieces.
Asian-American Literature is fully indexed and includes a comprehensive new introduction by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. An indispensable reference collection, it is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedgagogic resource.
Volume I: Literary History: Criticism and Theory
1 Preface and introduction to Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers
Frank Chin, Jeffrey Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong
2 Preface to Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context
Elaine H. Kim
3 Not just a “Special Issue”: gender, sexuality, and post-1965 Afro Asian coalition building in the Yardbird Reader and This Bridge Called My Back
Cheryl Higashida
4 The Woman Warrior versus The Chinaman Pacific: must a Chinese American critic choose between feminism and heroism?
King-Kok Cheung
5 Heterogeneity, hybridity, multiplicity: marking Asian American differences
Lisa Lowe
6 Denationalization reconsidered: Asian American cultural criticism at a theoretical crossroads
Sau-Ling C. Wong
7 Asians on the Rim: transnational capital and local community in the making of contemporary Asian America
Arif Dirlik
8 Alienation, abjection, and Asian American citizenship and Asian American identity in difference and diaspora
David Leiwei Li
9 Modelling the nation: the Asian/American split
David Palumbo-Liu
10 The limits of (South Asian) names and labels: postcolonial or Asian American?
Lavina Dhingra Shankar
11 Is yellow black or white?
Gary Y. Okihiro
12 Of antiblack racism
Vijay Prashad
13 The racial triangulation of Asian Americans
Claire Jean Kim
14 Settlers of color and “immigrant” hegemony: “locals” in Hawai‘i
Haunani-Kay Trask
15 Missile internationalism
Kuan-Hsing Chen
16 (Dis)owning America
Kandice Chuh
17 Doing cultural studies inside APEC: literature, cultural identity, and global/local dynamics in the American Pacific
Rob Wilson
18 Disappearing clauses: reconstituting America in the unincorporated territories
Allan Punzalan Isaac
19 In dialogue with Asian American studies and Racial form
Colleen Lye
20 The interethnic paradigm and the case of Asian American fiction
Caroline Rody
Volume II: Prose: Fiction and Non-fiction21 America in the heart: political desire in Younghill Kang, Carlos Bulosan, Milton Murayama, and John Okada
Patricia P. Chu
22 Distinguishing literature and the work of translation: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and repetition without return
Naoki Sakai
23 “The hybrids and the cosmopolitans”: race, gender, and masochism in Diana Chang’s The Frontiers of Love
Sandra Baringer
24 ‘Bled in, letter by letter’: translation, postmemory, and the subject of Korean War: history in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student
Daniel Y. Kim
25 On the origins of Asian American literature: the Eaton sisters and the hybrid body
Viet Thanh Nguyen
26 Transversing nationalism, gender, and sexuality in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters
Rachel Lee
27 Performance past correction: Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land
Shameem Black
28 Ha Jin’s A Free Life: revisiting the Künstlerroman
Bettina Hofmann
29 Decolonizing the Bildungsroman: narratives of war and womanhood in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman
Samina Najmi
30 Can Maxine Hong Kingston speak? The contingency of The Woman Warrior
David Leiwei Li
31 Ethical responsibility in intersubjective spaces: reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and “A Temporary Matter”
Gita Rajan
32 Citizen Kwang: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and the politics of consent
Betsy Huang
33 On ascriptive and acquisitional Americanness: The Accidental Asian and the illogic of assimilation
David Leiwei Li
34 Race, regionalism, and biopower in Yokohama, California
Janice Tanemura
35 Sex acts as assimilation acts: female power and passing in Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife and Jasmine
Susan Koshy
36 Hawaii’s complex idyll: All I Asking for Is My Body
Stephen H. Sumida
37 Deconstructing a narrative hierarchy: Leila Leong’s “I” in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone
Allen Gee
38 Enlarging the Vietnam canon: Sigrid Nunez’s For Rouenna
Philip D. Beidler
39 Counteracting the hegemonic discourse of “America”: Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats
Youngsuk Chae
40 Abjection, masculinity, and violence in Brian Roley’s American Son and Han Ong’s Fixer Chao
Eleanor Ty
41 “Sugar sisterhood”: situating the Amy Tan phenomenon
Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong
42 The end(s) of race
David L. Eng
43 Gaps and margins: sociology and assimilation in Jade Snow Wong and John Okada
Christopher Douglas
44 Appropriations of blackness
James Kyung-Jin Lee
45 Animals and systems of dirt in the works of Lois-Ann Yamanaka
Monica Chiu
46 The cartography of justice and truthful refractions in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange
Ruth Y. Hsu
47 Asian American autobiography for children: critical paradigms and creative practice
Rocío G. Davis
48 Bicultural world creation: Laurence Yep, Cynthia Kadahata, and Asian American fantasy
Celestine Woo
49 Homicidal tendencies: violence and the global economy in Asian American pulp fiction
Christopher A. Shinn
Volume III: Poetry
50 Transplantation and modernity: the Chinese/American poems of Angel Island
Steven G. Yao
51 A slightly-open door: Yone Noguchi and the invention of English haiku
Edward Marx
52 Writing the crises: the deployment of abjection in Ai’s dramatic monologues
Claudia Ingram
53 Still writing of the linden tree: the role of nature as preserver of the lyric in the poetry of Meena Alexander
Wendy Anne Kopisch
54 Intimacy and experiment in Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s Empathy
Charles Altieri
55 Modern warfare: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Myung Mi Kim
Josephine Nock-Hee Park
56 “I cannot find her”: the oriental feminine, racial melancholia, and Kimiko Hahn’s The Unbearable Heart
Juliana Chang
57 Beyond Lot’s wife: the immigration poems of Marilyn Chin, Garrett Hongo, Li-Young Lee, and David Mura
Mary Slowik
58 Yearning for the past: the dynamics of memory in Sansei internment poetry
Stan Yogi
59 Transcendentalism, ethnicity, and food in the work of Li-Young Lee
Wenying Xu
60 Beyond the length of an average penis: reading across traditions in the poetry of Timothy Liu
Richard Serrano
61 David Mura: where am I, the missing third?
Xiaojing Zhou
62 Body and female subjectivity in Cathy Song’s Picture Bride
Fu-Jen Chen
63 Mr. Moto’s monologue: John Yau and experimental Asian American writing
Timothy Yu
Volume IV: Drama and Performance
64 The Americanization of Americans: the phenomenon of Nisei Internment Camp Theater
Robert Cooperman
65 Asian Americans in progress: College Plays 1937–1955
Josephine Lee
66 Performing the margins: ethics and the poetics of Frank Chin’s theatrical discourse
Jinqi Ling
67 The mess behind the veil: assimilating Ping Chong
James Frieze
68 The dream of a butterfly
Rey Chow
69 De/posing stereotype on the Asian American stage
Tina Chen
70 Out of the melting pot and into the Frontera: race, sex, nation, and home in Velina Hasu Houston’s American Dreams
Michele Janette
71 Staging heterogeneity: contemporary Asian American drama
Christiane Schlote
72 Beyond identity politics: national and transnational dialogues in Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and Chay Yew’s A Beautiful Country
Nancy Cho
73 A sians in America: millennial approaches to Asian Pacific American performance
Karen Shimakawa
74 Asian American theatre in the 1990s
Esther Kim Lee
75 Kickin’ the white man’s ass: Black Power, aesthetics, and the Asian martial arts
Fred Ho
76 Rapping and repping Asian: race, authenticity, and the Asian American MC
Oliver Wang
77 Changing faces: recasting national identity in all-Asian(-)American dramas
Angela C. Pao
78 Violence, Hmong American visibility, and the precariousness of Asian race
Louisa Schein and Va-Megn Thoj
79 Cyberrace
Lisa Nakamura
Biography
David Leiwei Li is Professor of English at the University of Oregon, USA.