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.

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 The essays explore conventionally literary texts, genres such as mystery and speculative fiction, historical documents and legal texts, and visual media including films, photography, and graphic novels, emphasizing the ways that creators have crossed boundaries of genre and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

Examines the diasporic and transnational aspects of Asian-American literature and engages works of prose and poetry as aesthetic articulations of the fluid transnational identities formed by Asian-American writers.

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.

A first of its kind, The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature provides an overview of Comparative North American Literature, a cutting-edge discipline. Contributors make important interventions into multiculturalism in North America and into U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada border literatures.

This book explores the use of literary fantasy in the construction of identity and ‘home’ in contemporary diasporic Chinese women’s literature. It argues that the use of fantasy acts as a way of undermining the power of patriarchy and unsettling fixed notions of home. The idea of home explored in this book relates to complicated struggles to gain a sense of belonging, as experienced by marginalized subjects in constructing their diasporic identities — which can best be understood as unstable, shifting, and shaped by historical conditions and power relations. Fantasy is seen to operate in the corpus of this book as a literary mode, as defined by Rosemary Jackson. Literary fantasy offers a way to rework ancient myths, fairy tales, ghost stories and legends; it also subverts conventional narratives and challenges the power of patriarchy and other dominant ideologies. Through a critical reading of four diasporic Chinese women authors, namely, Maxine Hong Kingston, Adeline Yen Mah, Ying Chen and Larissa Lai, this book aims to offer critical insights into how their works re-imagine a ‘home’ through literary fantasy which leads beyond nationalist and Orientalist stereotypes; and how essentialist conceptions of diasporic culture are challenged by global geopolitics and cultural interactions.

Provides the most comprehensive collection of scholarship on the multiethnic literature of the United States A Companion to the Multiethnic Literature of the United States is the first in-depth reference work dedicated to the histories, genres, themes, cultural contexts, and new directions of American literature by authors of varied ethnic backgrounds. Engaging multiethnic literature as a distinct field of study, this unprecedented volume brings together a wide range of critical and theoretical approaches to offer analyses of African American, Latinx, Native American, Asian American, Jewish American, and Arab American literatures, among others. Chapters written by a diverse panel of leading contributors explore how multi-ethnic texts represent racial, ethnic, and other identities, center the lives and work of the marginalized and oppressed, facilitate empathy with the experiences of others, challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, and other hateful rhetoric, and much more. Informed by recent and leading-edge methodologies within the field, the Companion examines how theoretical approaches to multiethnic literature such as cultural studies, queer studies, ecocriticism, diaspora studies, and posthumanism inform literary scholarship, pedagogy, and curricula in the US and around the world. Explores the national, international, and transnational contexts of US ethnic literature Addresses how technology and digital access to archival materials are impacting the study, reception, and writing of multiethnic literature Discusses how recent developments in critical theory impact the reading and interpretation of multiethnic US literature Highlights significant themes and major critical trends in genres including science fiction, drama and performance, literary nonfiction, and poetry Includes coverage of multiethnic film, history, and culture as well as newer art forms such as graphic narrative and hip-hop Considers various contexts in multiethnic literature such as politics and activism, immigration and migration, and gender and sexuality A Companion to the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States is an invaluable resource for scholars, researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, and general readers studying all aspects of the subject