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This study establishes connections between the themes and methodologies of writers within the South Asian diaspora in the New World, and serves both serious analysts as well as beginning readers of South Asian fiction. It is an impartial study that analyzes the stylistic excellence of South Asian fiction and the clearly emergent motifs of the writers, recognizing the value of the interplay of cultural differences and the need for resolution of those differences. The book begins with a discussion...

Cold War Friendships explores the plight of the Asian ally of the American wars in Korea and Vietnam. Enlisted into proxy warfare, this figure is not a friend but a "friendly," a wartime convenience enlisted to serve a superpower. It is through this deeply unequal relation, however, that the Cold War friendly secures her own integrity and insists upon her place in the neocolonial imperium. This study reads a set of highly enterprising wartime subjects who make their way to the US via difficult a...

During the height of 19th century imperialism, Rudyard Kipling published his famous poem “The White Man’s Burden.” While some of his American readers argued that the poem served as justification for imperialist practices, others saw Kipling’s satirical talents at work and read it as condemnation. Gretchen Murphy explores this tension embedded in the notion of the white man’s burden to create a new historical frame for understanding race and literature in America. Shadowing the White Man’s Burden...

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer expert commentary on major themes, plots, characters, literary devices, and historical background. The latest generation of titles in this series also feature glossaries and visual elements that complement the classic, familiar format. Explore how generational and cultural differences can divide - and then unite - immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters as you study CliffsNotes on The Joy Luck Club. This novel describes the lives of four wo...

LatinAsian Cartographies examines how Latina/o and Asian American writers provide important counter-narratives to the stories of racial encroachment that have come to characterize twenty-first century dominant discourses on race. Susan Thananopavarn contends that the Asian American and Latina/o presence in the United States, although often considered marginal in discourses of American history and nationhood, is in fact crucial to understanding how national identity has been constructed historica...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE • A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness “Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen In development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee • One of Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • Named One of the Best Book...

2013 Winner of the Asian American Studies Association's prize in Literary Studies Anger and bitterness tend to pervade narratives written by second generation Asian American daughters, despite their largely unremarkable upbringings. In Ingratitude, erin Khue Ninh explores this apparent paradox, locating in the origins of these women's maddeningly immaterial suffering not only racial hegemonies but also the structure of the immigrant family itself. She argues that the filial debt of these women...

For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders' Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father's striking account of his chi...

One of the central tasks of Asian American literature, argues Patricia P. Chu, has been to construct Asian American identities in the face of existing, and often contradictory, ideas about what it means to be an American. Chu examines the model of the Anglo-American bildungsroman and shows how Asian American writers have adapted it to express their troubled and unstable position in the United States. By aligning themselves with U.S. democratic ideals while also questioning the historical realiti...

This title includes in-depth critical discussions of Amy Tan's novel. Edited and introduced by Robert C. Evans, Distinguished Teaching Professor and Distinguished Research Professor at Auburn University at Montgomery, this volume presents an array of scholarship on a novel that is quickly becoming a modern classic, Amy Tan's ""The Joy Luck Club"". The volume opens Evans' introduction in which he emphasizes the artistic excellence of Tan's text. Joanne McCarthy offers an overview of Tan's life in...

Author Toni Morrison emphasized the need to analyze race in American literature by white authors by shifting focus "from the racial object to the racial subject". Representations of whiteness in certain works by Asian American authors reveal what happens when the visual dynamics of ethnography are reversed, and those persons often considered as objects-Asian Americans, other minorities-are allowed to see and judge those who so often objectify them. This study focuses on the construct of whitene...

Examining nine Asian Canadian and Asian American narratives, Eleanor Ty explores how authors empower themselves, represent differences, and re-script their identities as 'visible minorities' within the ideological, imaginative, and discursive space given to them by dominant culture. In various ways, Asian North Americans negotiate daily with 'birthmarks,' their shared physical features marking them legally, socially, and culturally as visible outsiders, and paradoxically, as invisible to mainst...

On December 8, 1941, as the Pacific War reached the Philippines, Yay Panlilio, a Filipina-Irish American, faced a question with no easy answer: How could she contribute to the war? In this 1950 memoir, The Crucible: An Autobiography by Colonel Yay, Filipina American Guerrilla, Panlilio narrates her experience as a journalist, triple agent, leader in the Philippine resistance against the Japanese, and lover of the guerrilla general Marcos V. Augustin. From the war-torn streets of Japanese-occup...

Marlon Hom has selected and translated 220 rhymes from two collections of Chinatown songs published in 1911 and 1915. The songs are outspoken and personal, addressing subjects as diverse as sex, frustrations with the American bureaucracy, poverty and alienation, and the loose morals of the younger generation of Americans. Hom has arranged the songs thematically and gives an overview of early Chinese American literature.

A variety of immigrant narratives probe the dynamic process of South Asian Americanization

This landmark anthology provide the first historical survey of Asian American poetry. The poems were selected to reflect both the high quality and wide range of Asian American poetic discourse. The anthology begins with writings from the 1890s by Sadakichi Harmann and Yone Noguchi and includes poems by Jun Fujita (1923), Bunishi Kagawa (1930), Hisaye Yamamoto (1940), Diana Change 91946) , and others. Earlly work by well-known writers Joy Kogawa, Jessica Hagedorn, and Lawson Inada are also repres...