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In the Cold War era, Chinese Americans were caught in a double-bind. The widespread stigma of illegal immigration, as it was often called, was most easily countered with the model minority, assimilating and forming nuclear families, but that in turn led to further stereotypes. In Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities, Heidi Kim investigates how Chinese American writers navigated a strategy to normalize and justify the Chinese presence during a time when fears of Communism ran high. Kim explores h...

Unsettled Solidarities examines contemporary Asian and Indigenous cross-representations within different settler states in the Americas. Quynh Nhu Le looks at literary works by both groups alongside public apologies, interviews, and hemispheric race theories to trace cross-community tensions and possibilities for solidarities amidst the uneven imposition of racialization and settler colonization. Contrasting texts such as Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men with Gerald Vizenor's Hiroshima Bugi, an...

These essays on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet explore every aspect of Robert Penn Warren's work; the persistent themes that run throughout his poetry and his fiction; the achievement of such major novels as All the King's Men, Band of Angels, and World Enough and Time; and his novel in verse, Brother to Dragons. Warren's own essay, Knowledge and the Image of Man--a defense of man's right to be himself, to be a man--is included, as is the complete transcript of the Paris Review int...

Citizenship on Catfish Row focuses on three seminal works in the history of American culture: the first full-length narrative film, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation; the first integrated musical, Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's Showboat; and the first great American opera, George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Each of these works sought to make a statement about American identity in the form of a narrative, and each included in that narrative a prominent role for Black people.Each work inc...

This volume spotlights the unique suitability and situatedness of Filipinx American studies both as a site for reckoning with the work of historicizing U.S. empire in all of its entanglements, as well as a location for reclaiming and theorizing the interlocking histories and contemporary trajectories of global capitalism, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. It encompasses an interrogation of the foundational status of empire in the interdiscipline; modes of labor analysis and other forms of k...

This book examines how Asian American authors since 1945 have deployed the stereotype of Asian American inscrutability in order to re-examine and debunk the stereotype in various ways. By paying special attention to what narrative theorists have regarded as one of the most extraordinary aspects of fiction—its ability to give (or else deny) readers a remarkably detailed knowledge of the inner lives of their characters—this book explores deeply and systematically the specific ways Asian American...

Considering Chang and Eng's body in America from the nineteenth century to the present

"Chinese American Literature since the 1850s" traces the origins and development of the extensive and largely neglected body of literature written in English and in Chinese, assessing its themes and style and placing it in a broad social and historical context. This essential volume, a much-needed introduction and guide to the field, shows how change and continuity in the Chinese American experience are reflected in the writings of immigrants from China and their descendants in the United States...

-- Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights -- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers

The Sino-Japanese War (1937 - 1945) was fought in the Asia-Pacific theatre between Imperial Japan and China, with the United States as the latter's major military ally. An important line of investigation remains, questioning how the history of this war has been passed on to post-war generations' consciousness, and how information sources, particularly those exposed to young people in their formative years, shape their knowledge and bias of the conflict as well as World War II more generally. Th...

Relative Histories focuses on the Asian American memoir that specifically recounts the story of at least three generations of the same family. This form of auto/biography concentrates as much on other members of one's family as on oneself, generally collapses the boundaries conventionally established between biography and autobiography, and in many cases--as Rocio G. Davis proposes for the auto/biographies of ethnic writers--crosses the frontier into history, promoting collective memory. Davis c...

This book contains plays by Genny Lim (Paper Angels, ) Wakako Yamauchi (The Music Lessons, ) Momoko Iko (Gold Watch, ) Velina Hasu Houston (Tea, ) Jeannie Barroga (Walls, ) and Elizabeth Wong (Letters to a Student Revolutionary.) The volume includes an extended introduction, a profile of each playwright, and an appendix. The six plays of this anthology represent some of the best dramatic literature written by Asian American women since the 1970s. Each is a groundbreaking work and addresses in it...