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200 books match the query 'Asian American & Pacific Islander' and 3 start with g

cover of Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community

Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim

Creating Countercultural Community

Timothy Gray

University of Iowa Press, 2006

In Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim, Timothy Gray draws upon previously unpublished journals and letters as well as his own close readings of Gary Snyder’s well-crafted poetry and prose to track the early career of a maverick intellectual whose writings powered the San Francisco Renaissance of the 1950s and 1960s. Exploring various aspects of cultural geography, Gray asserts that this west coast literary community seized upon the idea of a Pacific Rim regional structure in part to recognize their Orientalist desires and in part to consolidate their opposition to America’s cold war ideology, which tended to divide East from West. The geographical consciousness of Snyder’s writing was particularly influential, Gray argues, because it gave San Francisco’s Beat and hippie cultures a set of physical coordinates by which they could chart their utopian visions of peace and love.

Gray’s introduction tracks the increased use of “Pacific Rim discourse” by politicians and business leaders following World War II. Ensuing chapters analyze Snyder’s countercultural invocation of this regional idea, concentrating on the poet’s migratory or “creaturely” sensibility, his gift for literary translation, his physical embodiment of trans-Pacific ideals, his role as tribal spokesperson for Haight-Ashbury hippies, and his burgeoning interest in environmental issues. Throughout, Gray’s citations of such writers as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Joanne Kyger shed light on Snyder’s communal role, providing an amazingly intimate portrait of the west coast counterculture. An interdisciplinary project that utilizes models of ecology, sociology, and comparative religion to supplement traditional methods of literary biography, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim offers a unique perspective on Snyder’s life and work.

This book will fascinate literary and Asian studies scholars as well as the general reader interested in the Beat movement and multicultural influences on poetry.
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cover of Gastrodiplomacy: Chinese Exclusion and the Ascent of Chinese Restaurants in New York City, 1870–1943

Gastrodiplomacy

Chinese Exclusion and the Ascent of Chinese Restaurants in New York City, 1870–1943

Heather Ruth Lee

University of Chicago Press, 2027

Traces how Chinese migrants challenged racialization and disenfranchisement by establishing Chinese restaurants during the Gilded Age. 

In Gastrodiplomacy, Heather Ruth Lee dives deep into not just the history of Chinese restaurants in early twentieth-century New York City but the delicate, inchoate, and constantly evolving dynamics among their owners, workers, and their predominantly white clientele. Lee argues that the stylistic and capitalist choices made by restaurateurs (“gastrodiplomats”) had outsized political effects on paternalistic white diners (“gastroliberals”) who patronized their establishments, particularly when it came to racial relations in cities that were growing and diversifying. Lee is not starry-eyed—satisfying white tongues and stomachs didn’t lead to an urban utopia of peace, harmony, and brotherhood—but she shows the great and subtle influences of Chinese migrants on American urban space, culture, and metropolitan identity in a defining time.

In Lee’s capable and compelling telling, the Chinese restaurant becomes a distinctive locus for the negotiation of political power, cultural influence, urban identity, and more. Gastrodiplomacy reveals much about burgeoning and increasingly cosmopolitan American cities, as well as about their dynamic relationships with the fluidities of the American character.

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cover of Ghost Of

Ghost Of

Diana Khoi Nguyen

Omnidawn, 2018

Ghost Of is a mourning song, not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space.

Ghost Of was selected by Terrance Hayes to win Omnidawn’s Open Poetry Book Contest. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and L.A. Times Book Prize.
 
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