Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
  • Cited by 4
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
December 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781107284289
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781107284289
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, American Studies, Asian Literature, Asian Studies
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature presents a comprehensive history of the field, from its origins in the nineteenth century to the present day. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of Asian American writing that help readers to understand how authors have sought to make their experiences meaningful. Covering subjects from autobiography and Japanese American internment literature to contemporary drama and social protest performance, this History traces the development of a literary tradition while remaining grounded in current scholarship. It also presents new critical approaches to Asian American literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by leading scholars in the field, The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for years to come.

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 21 - Contemporary Filipino American Writers and the Legacy of Imperialism
    pp 371-386
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Asian American participation in the Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State College revealed the nascent Asian American movement's commitment to self-determination for Asian American communities and solidarity with other non-white groups in the United States. It was appropriate that the first large-scale Asian American actions took place at San Francisco State, which had been roiled in student activism throughout the early to middle 1960s. Opposition to the US war in Vietnam contributed greatly to the emergence and growth of the Asian American movement, which was deeply influenced by some segments of the mainstream antiwar movement. The liberation of women also proved to be an important and complex aspect of the Asian American movement's struggle. The social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s created spaces in which multiethnic Asian American arts, culture and literature arose as a distinct body of works.
  • 22 - Beyond Solitary Confinement: Rethinking the Sociopolitical Context of Local Literature in Hawai‘i
    pp 389-405
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on Harry Elam's theory of social protest theater to galvanize support and direct sympathizers toward campaigns of political resistance. Looking at the musical trio A Grain of Sand and the theater work of Sining Bayan's political performances provides an opportunity to analyze movement art beyond the written text to foreground movement art as a social experience, a form of interaction between people, sound, and space. A Grain of Sand's performance of Asian American as ordinary American is a radical re-embodiment of Americanness. A Grain of Sand casts Asian Americans' ordinariness as Americans emerging within histories of racism, US imperialism and capitalism. The chapter also focuses on the internationalist politics of Bayan's political plays to underscore the progressive transnational political practice at work in Asian American movement art. The theater of Bayan puts in focus how theater constituted political action for organizing against President Ferdinand Marcos's martial law.
  • 23 - Contemporary Asian American Drama
    pp 406-421
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter focuses on important early Asian American literary anthologies, those that had a significant impact on the field in general and in shaping Asian American cultural identities in particular. Aiiieeeee! is the most well-known early anthology of Asian American writing. The important development in Asian American literary anthologizing was work by feminist editors with the express goal of recovering, discovering, and promoting writing by a broad range of Asian American women. The most significant and widely available of feminist anthologies includes The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology. Despite the intersectional approach through race and gender of these anthologies, which might seem to narrow the conception of identity they advocate, they in fact take a more expansive approach to Asian American identity than their earlier, male-dominated counterparts. The editors seem more interested in attempting to represent diverse identities of Asian American women.
  • 24 - “More Than You Ever Knew You Knew”: The Rising Prestige of Fiction
    pp 422-436
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter traces the arc of Maxine Hong Kingston's career focusing on her evolving artistic and social vision. It explores the body of her work from The Woman Warrior and China Men to her novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book and her more recent books The Fifth Book of Peace and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. The chapter reanimates the critical reception of her oeuvre through the multiple vantage points of Asian American studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, and theory. It outlines The Woman Warrior's contribution to early debates about Asian American identity and cultural authenticity. The chapter examines the affinities of her work to feminism and postmodernism. While exploring the affinities between Asian American texts and postmodern or modernist literary constructions has helped Asian American critics to move beyond merely ethnographic or sociological study, David Palumbo-Liu emphasizes the importance of historically locating such literatures and their aesthetic modes.
  • 26 - The Forgotten War in Korea
    pp 454-468
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Examining Asian American literature from 1968 until the present, what readers encounter is a body of literature and ways of thinking about that literature that have grown rapidly in content, complexity, and contradiction. Within an academic context, the Asian American literary criticism pioneered by Elaine Kim was disruptive in terms of introducing an entirely new body of writers and texts to consider. The emergence of Asian American literature as an academic field, in the end, cannot be separated from the emergence of Asian Americans as a partially excluded and partially included minority in all strata of American life, including literature and the academy. In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, Asian Americans were mostly excluded from American life and culture, and this exclusion eventually led to a relatively unified and coherent definition of Asian American literature.
  • 27 - The American War in Viet Nam and Its Diasporas
    pp 469-483
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The ascent of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée into the Asian American literary canon in the early 1990s marks the precise moment when theory enters into Asian American studies. While Dictée has often been read as exemplary of a move away from identity toward theoretical abstraction, it may be more accurate to view it as a divided text that moves ambivalently between the needs of identity politics and the demands of theoretical critique. Early publications and anthologies drew on a range of disciplinary methodologies, while also being influenced by the radical politics of the Asian American movement. The readings of Dictée advanced in Writing Self, Writing Nation brings Asian American studies into direct contact with theory. In these readings, the impact of theory, both in Dictée and in its interpretation, is primarily deconstructive, challenging the narratives of identity, unity, and nationalism that have formed the traditional basis for Asian American studies.
  • 28 - Refugee Aesthetics: Cambodia, Laos, and the Hmong
    pp 484-500
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores why Lisa Lowe's essay on Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences, from her book Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, and its related focus on clearing a space for diaspora and transnationalism, was so instrumental in creating a paradigmatic shift in the ways in which literary scholars approached questions of inclusions and exclusion within Asian American studies. It explores why this essay struck such a responsive chord among Asian Americanist scholars and writers. While the conceptual framework that Lowe advanced in heterogeneity, hybridity and multiplicity has been foundational within Asian American literary studies, it is also notable for ushering in new forms of critique. In an increasingly neoliberal moment, there is an ever-likely danger of further homogenization of the Asian subject. Lowe's essay serves as an important reminder of the need for literary critique to think through the structuring differences of heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity.
  • 29 - The 9/11 of Our Imaginations: Islam, the Figure of the Muslim, and the Failed Liberalism of the Racial Present
    pp 503-518
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter describes the work of several South Asian diasporic novelists, namely Salman Rushdie, Hari Kunzru, Mohsin Hamid and Bharati Mukherjee. These works invite a reframing of Asia not as a singular category but as a pluralized and shifting matrix of identity positions, albeit notionally anchored to nation-state formations. The need to pluralize Asia and complicate received formations of Asian identities is even more pressing in North America, where Indian Americans are not the predominant Asian American ethnic group. Diasporic South Asian self-fashioning is a complicated matter in the works of Salman Rushdie. The Asia projected by liberal Western multiculturalist discourse is not necessarily the Asia envisioned by Asians, whether they live in South Asia or elsewhere. This then is one of the reasons to pluralize both national and diasporic self-fashioning. Cosmopolitanism and transnationalism are recurrent themes in many recent South Asian diasporic novels, challenging essentialist constructions of national and personal authenticity.
  • 30 - Narrating War: Arab and Muslim American Aesthetics
    pp 519-534
  • View abstract

    Summary

    South Asian American literature makes readers confront the triangulation of British and US empires in processes of South Asian racialization in the United States, forcing one to think about the United States and Britain as aligned and competing empires. South Asian American literature causes one to consider how the United States assumes the imperial mantle by calling attention to the connections between subcontinental nationalisms. The first so-called subaltern diaspora of the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries was made up primarily of slaves, indentured laborers, and other kinds of workers to Indian Ocean islands, East Africa, the Caribbean, and the West Coast of North America. South Asian diasporic literature in the Americas is one of the most cohesive hemispherically oriented diasporic literatures within Asian American studies. The creative work of South Asian American literature's most prominent author Jhumpa Lahiri offers a barometer of the evolving perceptions of South Asian American literature.
  • 31 - Thick Time and Space: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Aesthetics
    pp 535-550
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines important developments in Filipino American literature since the pioneer Filipino American writers best exemplified by N.V.M. Gonzalez, Carlos Bulosan, José García Villa, and Bienvenido Santos. Filipino American novels deal with the ongoing political and cultural legacy of war and imperialism, and can be roughly divided into four different types: those concerned with the recovery of Filipino history and collective memory; those that attempt to contest (neo)colonialism through postmodern aesthetics; those that represent growing up in a new, globalized, and transnational world; and those that deal with issues caused by the events of 9/11. Jessica Haledon links the discovery and conquest of the Philippines by the Spaniards with American neocolonial cultural imperialism in her novel, Dream Jungle. As Filipino American community develops and matures, its literary production continues to expand its rich thematic threads and engagement with sociopolitical concerns that affect not only Filipino Americans but Filipinos worldwide.
  • 33 - Beyond National Literatures: Empire and Amitav Ghosh
    pp 567-582
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter deals with the rethinking of sociopolitical context of Hawai'i literature under the backdrop of Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging. The turbulence that erupted as a result of the award given to her for her work revealed much about the Islands' tendency toward provincialism and discrete factionalism that at one time pitted locals against outsiders, and later settler Asians against native Hawaiians. The global sparring for political hegemony that directly influenced the plantation hierarchy of race relations has been increasingly scrutinized in recent years, encouraging local-heritage writers to look beyond the confines of Hawai'i's shores to delve into the larger geopolitical machinations that playout on the level of the individual. For Michelle Cruz Skinner, Hawai'i is just a small aspect of the larger collection of voices and experiences of the Filipino Diaspora. Any reading of Hawai'i's and its literary heritages must take into account the clash of ideologies between Euro-centric and Asian-centric postures.
  • Bibliography
    pp 583-622
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The influence of the first-wave playwrights on contemporary Asian American drama has been substantial and enduring. Themes of history, autobiography, assimilation, and racism usually associated with first-wave playwrights would continue to be dramatized and investigated by second- and third -wave playwrights. Starting in the late 1990s, third-wave playwrights began to debut in theater in large numbers. The plays by third-wave Asian American playwrights reflect the overall trend in contemporary American drama, which emphasizes experimentation in form and social issues in content. Many American plays since the 1990s have been about politics of race, gender, and sexuality. In the twenty-first century, Asian American playwrights have increasingly found inspiration in popular culture, avant-garde performance, social media and the effects of globalization. Asian American plays can be seen in multiple cities in the country, and the range of genres, styles and topics varies as widely as the growing diversity of Asian Americans.

Page 2 of 2

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.