The Politics Of The Visible In Asian North American Narratives

Through close readings grounded in the socio-historical context of each work, Ty studies how authors and filmmakers meet the gaze of the dominant culture and respond to the assumptions and meanings commonly associated with Orientalized, visible bodies. Ty does not survey Asian Canadian and Asian America literature, but presents readings of selected texts that actively engage with issues of otherness, visibility, and identification. Many of them, she says, are in the process of working out how larger issues of representation, power, and history affect Asian North American subjectivity. Parts of the work have been published previously.

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 mainstream history and culture. Ty argues that writers such as Denise Chong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Wayson Choy recast the marks of their bodies and challenge common perceptions of difference based on the sights, smells, dress, and other characteristics of their hyphenated lives. Others, like filmmaker Mina Shum and writers Bienvenido Santos and Hiromi Goto, challenge the means by which Asian North American subjects are represented and constructed in the media and in everyday language. Through close readings grounded in the socio-historical context of each work, Ty studies the techniques of various authors and filmmakers in their meeting of the gaze of dominant culture and their response to the assumptions and meanings commonly associated with Orientalized, visible bodies.

From the short stories and journalism of Sui Sin Far to Maxine Hong Kingston's pathbreaking The Woman Warrior to recent popular and critical successes such as Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians, Asian North American literature and media encompass a long history and a diverse variety of genres and aesthetic approaches. The essays in this volume provide context for understanding the history of Asian immigrants to the United States and Canada and the experiences of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Contributors address historical contexts, from the early enactment of Asian exclusion laws to the xenophobia following 9/11, and provide tools for textual analysis. The essays explore conventionally literary texts, genres such as mystery and speculative fiction, historical documents and legal texts, and visual media including films, photography, and graphic novels, emphasizing the ways that creators have crossed boundaries of genre and produced innovative new forms.

A Library Journal Best Reference Book of 2022 This book represents the culmination of over 150 years of literary achievement by the most diverse ethnic group in the United States. Diverse because this group of ethnic Americans includes those whose ancestral roots branch out to East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Western Asia. Even within each of these regions, there exist vast differences in languages, cultures, religions, political systems, and colonial histories. From the earliest publication in 1887 to the latest in 2021, this dictionary celebrates the incredibly rich body of fiction, poetry, memoirs, plays, and children’s literature. Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries on genres, major terms, and authors. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this topic.

The nine essays in Asian North American Identities explore how Asian North Americans are no longer caught between worlds of the old and the new, the east and the west, and the south and the north. Moving beyond national and diasporic models of ethnic identity to focus on the individual feelings and experiences of those who are not part of a dominant white majority, the essays collected here draw from a wide range of sources, including novels, art, photography, poetry, cinema, theatre, and popular culture. The book illustrates how Asian North Americans are developing new ways of seeing and thinking about themselves by eluding imposed identities and creating spaces that offer alternative sites from which to speak and imagine. Contributors are Jeanne Yu-Mei Chiu, Patricia Chu, Rocio G. Davis, Donald C. Goellnicht, Karlyn Koh, Josephine Lee, Leilani Nishime, Caroline Rody, Jeffrey J. Santa Ana, Malini Johar Schueller, and Eleanor Ty.

Poetry by Asian American writers has had a significant impact on the landscape of contemporary American poetry, and a book-length critical treatment of Asian American poetry is long overdue. In this groundbreaking book, Xiaojing Zhou demonstrates how many Asian American poets transform the conventional “I” of lyric poetry—based on the traditional Western concept of the self and the Cartesian “I”—to enact a more ethical relationship between the “I” and its others. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of the ethics of alterity—which argues that an ethical relation to the other is one that acknowledges the irreducibility of otherness—Zhou offers a reconceptualization of both self and other. Taking difference as a source of creativity and turning it into a form of resistance and a critical intervention, Asian American poets engage with broader issues than the merely poetic. They confront social injustice against the other and call critical attention to a concept of otherness which differs fundamentally from that underlying racism, sexism, and colonialism. By locating the ethical and political questions of otherness in language, discourse, aesthetics, and everyday encounters, Asian American poets help advance critical studies in race, gender, and popular culture as well as in poetry. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity is not limited, however, to literary studies: it is an invaluable response to the questions raised by increasingly globalized encounters across many kinds of boundaries. The Poets Marilyn Chin, Kimiko Hahn, Myung Mi Kim, Li Young Lee, Timothy Liu, David Mura, and John Yau

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 growth, and cultural success. As Ty shows, these storytellers have done more than reject a narrowly defined road to happiness. They have rejected neoliberal capitalism itself. In so doing, they demand that the rest of us reconsider our outmoded ideas about the so-called model minority.

This volume traces the formation of the Asian American literary canon and the field of Asian American Studies from 1965-1996. It is intended for an academic audience, ranging from advanced undergraduate students to scholars from a variety of disciplines, interested in the formation of Asian American literary studies from 1965-1996.