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It's often said that we are what we wear. Tracing an American trajectory in fashion, Lauren Cardon shows how we become what we wear. Over the twentieth century, the American fashion industry diverged from its roots in Paris, expanding and attempting to reach as many consumers as possible. Fashion became a tool for social mobility. During the late twentieth century, the fashion industry offered something even more valuable to its consumers: the opportunity to explore and perform. The works Cardon...

In her radical exploration of cultural and personal identity, the writer and artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha sought 'the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue'. Her first book, the highly original postmodern text "Dictee", published in 1982, is considered a classic work of autobiography and is widely read by students internationally. This stunning selection of her uncollected and hitherto unpublished work at last brings together Cha's writings and text-based pieces with image...

This collection, the first to address Asian and Asian Americans' contributions to New England, highlights a broad range of Asian American communities and historical experiences. From the poignant writings of a young Chinese immigrant to the influence of hip-hop in a New Hampshire Lao community, this original and unique collection seeks to establish a regional template for the study of Asian American lives and art far from the West Coast. These essays provide not just a record of particular achie...

The refugee is conventionally considered a powerless figure, eagerly cast aside by both migrant and host communities. In his book, The Refugee Aesthetic, Timothy August investigates how and why a number of Southeast Asian American artists and writers have recently embraced the figure of the refugee as a particularly transformative position. He explains how these artists, theorists, critics, and culture-makers reconstruct their place in the American imagination by identifying and critiquing the u...

In this pathbreaking book, King-Kok Cheung sheds new light on the thematic and rhetoncal uses of silence in fiction by three Asian American women: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and JoyKogawa. Boldly articulating the unspeakable, these writers break the silence imposed by families or ethnic communities and defy the dominant culture that suppresses the voicing of minority experiences. Yet at the same time, they demonstrate how silences—voiceless gestures, textual ellipses, authorial hesit...

Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America examines the idealisation of Asian America by its intellectuals, the saturation of Asian America with capitalist practices, and the challenges posed by Asian America's ideological diversity. Viet Nguyen argues that Asian American intellectuals need to examine their own assumptions about race, culture, and politics, and he makes his case through the example of literature, which still remains a cultural arena of cultural production for...

This ground-breaking edited volume includes chapters which explore the past, present and future position of Chinese American authors within the framework of what Harold Bloom identifies as the "Western literary canon." These selections, which simultaneously represent the exciting "transnational turn" in American literary studies, not only examine whether or not Chinese American literature is inside or outside the canon, but also question if there is, or should be, a literary canon at all. Moreov...

There is a tendency to think of Korean American literature—and Asian American literature writ large—as a field of study involving only two spaces, the United States and Korea, with the same being true in Asian studies of Korean Japanese (Zainichi) literature involving only Japan and Korea. This book posits that both fields have to account for three spaces: Korean American literature has to grapple with the legacy of Japanese imperialism in the United States, and Zainichi literature must account...

Guiyou Huang traces the history of Asian American literature from the end of World War II to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Huang covers six genres: anthology, autobiography/memoir, drama, fiction, poetry, and short fiction; reviews major historical developments and social movements; explains key literary terms; and offers a narrative, A-to-Z guide of major Asian American writers and their works, plus their critical reception. This guide covers Canadian and U.S. authors with cultura...

Acclaimed as one of the pioneering texts to introduce narratology (the theory that deals with the general principles underlying narrative texts) to classical scholarship, Irene de Jong's work explains the key concepts such as "narrator", "focalization" and "prolepsis", highlighting their relevance by using them for the analysis and interpretation of Homer's "Iliad". What is the role of the narrator and how do the parts of the story told by the narrator relate to the many speeches for which Homer...

China Reinterpreted is the first comprehensive study on the representation of Chinese figures and motifs in Muromachi Japanese noh theater. Given that China had a strong influence on Japanese culture from the sixth to the early seventeenth centuries, research on Japanese reception of Chinese culture abounds. This book examines how noh theater integrated earlier reception of Chinese culture in various disciplines to produce its reinterpretation of China and Chinese culture on stage. Centering on...

The Tao of S is an engaging study of American racialization of Chinese and Asians, Asian American writing, and contemporary Chinese cultural production, stretching from the nineteenth century to the present. Sheng-mei Ma examines the work of nineteenth-century "Sinophobic" American writers, such as Bret Harte, Jack London, and Frank Norris, and twentieth-century "Sinophiliac" authors, such as John Steinbeck and Philip K. Dick, as well as the movies Crazy Rich Asians and Disney's Mulan and a host...

Tricksters and Cosmopolitans is the first sustained exploration into the history of cross-cultural collaborations between Asian American writers and their non–Asian American editors and publishers. The volume focuses on the literary production of the cosmopolitan subject, featuring the writers Sui Sin Far, Jessica Hagedorn, Karen Tei Yamashita, Monique Truong, and Min Jin Lee. The newly imagined cosmopolitan subject that emerges from their works dramatically reconfigured Asian American female su...