Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits

edited by Shirley Lim, John Gamber, Stephen Sohn and Gina Valentino

Temple University Press, 2005
Cloth: 978-1-59213-450-2 | eISBN: 978-1-59213-452-6 | Paper: 978-1-59213-451-9
Library of Congress Classification PS153.A84T73 2006
Dewey Decimal Classification 810.9895

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits examines the diasporic and transnational aspects of Asian American literature and asserts the importance of a globalized imaginary in what has been considered an ethnic subgenre of American literature. The thirteen essays in this volume engage works of prose and poetry as aesthetic articulations of the fluid transnational identities formed by Asian American writers who move within and across national boundaries. With its emphasis on the transmigratory and flexible nature of Asian American literary production, the collection argues for an equally balanced mode of criticism that extends our readings of these works beyond the traditional limits of the American literary canon. Individual chapters feature such writers as Chang-rae Lee, Karen Tei Yamashita, Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Ha Jin, with attention to such discourses as gender, space and mobility, transnationalism, identity, genre, and post-coloniality.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Shirley Geok-Lin Lim is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, author of several works in criticism, poetry, fiction, and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands, and co-editor of Transnational Asia Pacific: Gender, Culture, and the Public Sphere and Reading the Literatures of Asian America (Temple).

John Blair Gamber is a Doctoral Scholars Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research includes investigations of portrayals of pollution in contemporary U.S. minority literature.

Stephen Hong Sohn is a Graduate Research Mentorship Fellow in the Department of English at University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the Asian American literature, postcolonial studies, urban studies, and theories of gender and sexuality.

Gina Valentino is a Graduate Opportunity Fellow in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on contemporary U.S. fiction and drama and working-class trauma in the new economy.

REVIEWS

"Increasingly commonplace yet still elusive, ideas of 'transnationalism' and 'diaspora' in Asian American studies get an energetic boost from this collection of highly readable critical essays. Looking for the cross-national, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic, and searching for global identity formations, the editors have stretched the boundaries and re-shaped Asian American literature, confirming once again that the field is dynamic and unstable."—Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History and Ethnic Studies and Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race in America, Brown University

"Transnational perspectives challenge conventional ways of organizing culture and knowledge around national spaces and languages, much more so than globalism which seeks to transcend national boundaries, but leaves them intact. The essays collected in this volume offer stimulating explorations of transnationalism in literatures produced by Asians in motion between Asia and the Americas, who are increasingly difficult to classify simply as Asian Americans. The issues raised should be of interest to all concerned with transmigrant literatures, and what they imply for the future of literature in general."—Arif Dirlik, Knight Professor of Social Science, University of Oregon

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction – Shirley Geok-lin Lim, John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn, and Gina ValentinoPart I. Fiction1. Re-Signed Subjects: Women, Work, and World in the Fiction of Carlos Bulosan and Hisaye Yamamoto – Cheryl Higashida2. "Just Another Ethnic Pol": Literary Citizenship in Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker – Liam Corley3. The Cartography of Justice and Truthful Refractions Found in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange – Ruth Y. Hsu4. "Valuing" Transnational Queerness: Politicized Bodies and Commodified Desires in Asian American Literature – Stephen Hong Sohn5. Ethical Responsibility in the Intersubjective Spaces: Reading Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies" and "A Temporary Matter" – Gita Rajan6. Abjection, Masculinity, and Violence in Brian Roley's American Son and Hans Ong's Fixer Chao – Eleanor TyPart II. Memoir/Autobiography7. Begin Here: A Critical Introduction to the Asian American Childhood – Rocío G. Davis8. The Poetics of Liminality and Misidentification: Winnifred Eaton's Me and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior – Katherine Hyunmi Lee9. Nation, Immigrant, Text: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee – Srimati MukherjeePart III. Poetry10. Kimiko's Hahn's "Interlingual Poetics" in Mosquito and Ant – Robert Grotjohn11. "Composed of Many Lengths of Bone": Myung Mi Kim's Reimagination of Image and Epic – Josephine Hock-Hee Park12. A Way in the World of an Asian American Existence: Agha Shahid Ali's Transimmigrant Spacing of North America and India/Kashmir – Maimuna Dali Islam13. Writing Otherwise than as a "Native Informant": Ha Jin's Poetry – Zhou XiaojingAbout the ContributorsIndex

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