Tell This Silence by Patti Duncan explores multiple meanings of speech and silence in Asian American women's writings in order to explore relationships among race, gender, sexuality, and national identity. Duncan argues that contemporary definitions of U.S. feminism must be expanded to recognize the ways in which Asian American women have resisted and continue to challenge the various forms of oppression in their lives. There has not yet been adequate discussion of the multiple meanings of silence and speech, especially in relation to activism and social-justice movements in the U.S. In particular, the very notion of silence continues to invoke assumptions of passivity, submissiveness, and avoidance, while speech is equated with action and empowerment.
However, as the writers discussed in Tell This Silence suggest, silence too has multiple meanings especially in contexts like the U.S., where speech has never been a guaranteed right for all citizens. Duncan argues that writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Mitsuye Yamada, Joy Kogawa, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nora Okja Keller, and Anchee Min deploy silence as a means of resistance. Juxtaposing their “unofficial narratives” against other histories—official U.S. histories that have excluded them and American feminist narratives that have stereotyped them or distorted their participation—they argue for recognition of their cultural participation and offer analyses of the intersections among gender, race, nation, and sexuality.
Tell This Silence offers innovative ways to consider Asian American gender politics, feminism, and issues of immigration and language. This exciting new study will be of interest to literary theorists and scholars in women's, American, and Asian American studies.
Crafted with lines from her late father’s letters, Jennifer Tseng’s Thanks for Letting Us Know You Are Alive is a portrait of an immigrant, a rootless person whose unspoken loss—that of his native geography, family, traditions, language—underlies every word. Though her father’s first language was Mandarin, for more than twenty years he wrote these letters in English, so that she could understand them. Some are riddled with errors, some nearly unintelligible. Lines from his letters appear as titles and are scattered throughout the poems, blending voices of father and daughter. This collection enacts what it means to lose someone and commune with them simultaneously—the paradox of grief and all it gives us.
The Japanese American communities in Oregon and southern Washington were relatively small and many of the detainees knew each other; they drew on existing family and community networks to help each other through the long summer, living in inhumane conditions under the constant threat of violence. Several members of Bara Ginsha, a Portland poetry group, decided to continue their work while imprisoned at the center, primarily by writing senryū, a type of Japanese poetry related to haiku.
They Never Asked is a collection of work produced by Bara Ginsha members in the WCCA camp, based on a journal kept by Masaki Kinoshita. The senryū collected here were written by a group of twenty-two poets, who produced hundreds of poems. Individually, the poems reflect the thoughts and feelings the authors experienced while being detained in the center; collectively, they reflect the resilience and resistance of a community denied freedom. Editors Shelley Baker-Gard, Michael Freiling, and Satsuki Takikawa present translations of the poems alongside the originals, supplemented by historical and literary context and a foreword by Duane Watari, Masaki Kinoshita’s grandson.
In the first book-length study of Vietnamese American literature, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud probes the complexities of Vietnamese American identity and politics. She provides an analytical introduction to the literature, showing how generational differences play out in genre and text. In addition, she asks, can the term Vietnamese American be disassociated from representations of the war without erasing its legacy?
Pelaud delineates the historical, social, and cultural terrains of the writing as well as the critical receptions and responses to them. She moves beyond the common focus on the Vietnam war to develop an interpretive framework that integrates post-colonialism with the multi-generational refugee, immigrant, and transnational experiences at the center of Vietnamese American narratives.
Her readings of key works, such as Andrew Pham's Catfish and Mandala and Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge show how trauma, racism, class and gender play a role in shaping the identities of Vietnamese American characters and narrators.
An exciting analysis of the myriad literary effects of Tiananmen, Belinda Kong's Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square is the first full-length study of fictions related to the 1989 movement and massacre. More than any other episode in recent world history, Tiananmen has brought a distinctly politicized Chinese literary diaspora into stark relief.
Kong redefines Tiananmen's meaning from an event that ended in local political failure to one that succeeded in producing a vital dimension of contemporary transnational writing today. She spotlights key writers-Gao Xingjian, Ha Jin, Annie Wang, and Ma Jian-who have written and published about the massacre from abroad. Their outsider/distanced perspectives inform their work, and reveal how diaspora writers continually reimagine Tiananmen's relevance to the post-1989 world at large.
Compelling us to think about how Chinese culture, identity, and politics are being defined in the diaspora, Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square candidly addresses issues of political exile, historical trauma, global capital, and state biopower.
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 childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen’s own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self—each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world. The novel, Jen writes, is fundamentally a Western form that values originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer’s life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, Tiger Writing radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.
Transpacific Imaginations is a study of how American literature is enmeshed with the literatures of Asia. The book begins with Western encounters with the Pacific: Yunte Huang reads Moby Dick as a Pacific work, looks at Henry Adams’s not talking about his travels in Japan and the Pacific basin in his autobiography, and compares Mark Twain to Liang Qichao. Huang then turns to Asian American encounters with the Pacific, concentrating on the "Angel Island" poems and on works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Araki Yasusada.
Huang’s argument that the Pacific forms American literature more than is generally acknowledged is a major contribution to our understanding of literary history. The book is in dialogue with cross-cultural studies of the Pacific and with contemporary innovative poetics. Huang has found a vehicle to join Asians and Westerners at the deepest level, and that vehicle is poetry. Poets can best imagine an ethical ground upon which different people join hands. Huang asks us to contribute to this effort by understanding the poets and writers already in the process of linking diverse peoples.
Treacherous Subjects is a provocative and thoughtful examination of Vietnamese films and literature viewed through a feminist lens. Lan Duong investigates the postwar cultural productions of writers and filmmakers, including Tony Bui, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Tran Anh Hung.
Taking her cue from the double meaning of "collaborator," Duong shows how history has shaped the loyalties and shifting alliances of the Vietnamese, many of whom are caught between opposing/constricting forces of nationalism, patriarchy, and communism. Working at home and in France and the United States, the artists profiled in Treacherous Subjects have grappled with the political and historic meanings of collaboration. These themes, which probe into controversial issues of family and betrayal, figure heavily in fictions such as the films The Scent of Green Papaya and Surname Viet Given Name Nam.
As writers and filmmakers collaborate, Duong suggests that they lay the groundwork for both transnational feminist politics and queer critiques of patriarchy.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press