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Asian diasporic writers imagine "home" in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry.

How do English-speaking novelists and filmmakers tell stories of China from a Chinese perspective? How do they keep up appearances of pseudo-Sino immanence while ventriloquizing solely in the English language? Anglo writers and their readers join in this century-old game of impersonating and dubbing Chinese. Throughout this wish fulfillment, writers lean on grammatical and conceptual frameworks of their mother tongue to represent an alien land and its yellowface aliens. Off-white or yellow-ish c...

Since the 1990s, a new cohort of Asian American writers has garnered critical and popular attention. Many of its members are the children of Asians who came to the United States after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted long-standing restrictions on immigration. This new generation encompasses writers as diverse as the graphic novelists Adrian Tomine and Gene Luen Yang, the short story writer Nam Le, and the poet Cathy Park Hong. Having scrutinized more than one hundred works by e...

Asian American War Stories examines contemporary Asian American literature that considers both the short-term and the long-term effects of war, trauma, and displacement on civilians, as well as the ways that individuals seek healing in the face of suffering. Through the works of contemporary writers like Chang-rae Lee, Ocean Vuong, Nora Okja Keller, Julie Otsuka, Lan Cao, and Lawson Inada, this book explores the ways that recent Asian American literature reflects the enduring consequences of Ame...

Are we born into this world intrinsically sinful, predisposed to evil? St Augustine passionately argued that we are; his opponents thought the notion an insult to a good God. The Church sided with Augustine, and ever since it has taught the doctrine of original sin: the idea that we are not born innocent, but that as babes we are corrupt, guilty, and worthy of condemnation.Perhaps no Christian teaching has been more controversial. G. K. Chesterton affirmed it as the sole provable doctrine and ar...

A ground-breaking work of Asian-American fiction in a brand new edition

This edition of Multicultural and Ethnic Children's Literature in the United States addresses both quantitative and more qualitative changes in this field over the last decade. Quantitative changes include more authors, books, and publishers; book review sources, booklists, and awards; organizations, institutions, and websites; and criticism and other scholarship. Qualitative changes include: -More support for new and emerging writers and illustrators; -Promotion of multicultural literature both...

Bhabha, in his preface, writes 'Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully encounter their horizons in the mind's eye'. From this seemingly impossibly metaphorical beginning, this volume confronts the realities of the concept of nationhood as it is lived and the profound ambivalence of language as it is written. From Gillian Beer's reading of Virginia Woolf, Rachel Bowlby's cultural history of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Francis Mulhern's study of Leaviste's 'Engl...

The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in the development of Asian Canadian literature. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s contextualizes and reanimates the urgency of that period, illustrates its historical specificities, and shows how the concerns of that momentafrom cultural appropriation to race essentialism to shifting models of the stateacontinue to resonate for contemporary discussions of race and literature in Canada. Lariss...

Black Bodies and Transhuman Realities: Scientifically Modifying the Black Body in Posthuman Literature and Culture makes a series of valuable contributions to ongoing dialogues surrounding posthuman blackness and Afro-transhumanism. The collection explores the Black body (self) in the context of transhuman realities from a variety of literary and artistic perspectives. These points of view convey the cultural, political, social, and historical implications that frame the space of Black embodimen...

A groundbreaking study of contemporary American poetry, Race and the Avant-Garde changes the way we think about race and literature. Examining two of the most exciting developments in recent American writing, Timothy Yu juxtaposes the works of experimental language poets and Asian American poets—concerned primarily with issues of social identity centered around discourses of race. Yu delves into the 1960s social upheaval to trace how Language and Asian American writing emerged as parallel poetic...

-- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature -- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism -- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index

The creation of a new school system in the Philippines in 1898 and educational reforms in occupied Japan, both with stated goals of democratization, speaks to a singular vision of America as savior, following its politics of violence with benevolent recuperation. The pedagogy of recovery-in which schooling was central and natives were forced to accept empire through education-might have shown how Americans could be good occupiers, but it also created projects of Orientalist racial management: Fi...

Co-published by Routledge and Edition SynapseAmerican 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 at...

Eleanor Ty's bold exploration of literature, plays, and film reveals how young Asian Americans and Asian Canadians have struggled with the ethos of self-sacrifice preached by their parents. This new generation's narratives focus on protagonists disenchanted with their daily lives. Many are depressed. Some are haunted by childhood memories of war, trauma, and refugee camps. Rejecting an obsession with professional status and money, they seek fulfillment by prioritizing relationships, personal gro...

Heroic women warriors as reflections of social and moral values

Before Starting Over is an informal chronicle of several important developments in English-language poetry during the nineties and the turn of the century, most importantly Asian American poetry, digital poetics, and the changing face of poetry's "experimental" wing. There is nothing pious about the approach: one chapter is a distillation of conversations and controversies that occurred on the internet via the author's blog, Free Space Comix, while another is largely composed of playful and pole...

How the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre haunts the work of writers in the Chinese diaspora.