1st Edition

Asian American Literature

Edited By David Leiwei Li
    1856 Pages
    by Routledge

    Co-published by Routledge and Edition Synapse

    American writers whose provenance lies in Asia have been producing and publishing work of interest and distinction for well over a century. However, in recent decades there has been an exponential growth in their output, and much Asian-American literature has now achieved new levels of both popular success and critical acclaim. Moreover, the burgeoning number of literary anthologies and academic studies attests to a growing and deepening scholarly attention. Indeed, Asian-American literature—and the serious critical work it has spawned—is now central to debates about national cultures, world civilizations, and transnational imaginations.

    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.