|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
American Book Award Winner (Before Columbus Foundation) The
phenomenon of "literary Chinatown"--the ghettoization of Chinese
American literature--was produced by the same dynamics of race and
representation that ghettoized the Chinese American community into
literal Chinatowns. In a 1982 response to reviews of Woman Warrior,
Maxine Hong Kingston pinpointed the crux of the matter: "How dare
they make their ignorance our inscrutability!" Jeffrey F. L.
Partridge examines the dynamic relationship between reader
expectations of Chinese American literature and the challenges to
these expectations posed by recent Chinese American texts,
challenges that push our understanding of a multicultural society
to new horizons. Partridge builds on the concept of a "reading
horizon"--a set of expectations and assumptions that a reader
brings to a text--to explore the crucial interplay between reader,
author, and text. Arguing that authors like Kingston, Li-Young Lee,
Gish Jen, Shawn Wong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and David Wong Louie
are aware of their readers' horizons and write to challenge those
assumptions, Partridge demonstrates how their writings function as
a potent medium of cultural transformation. With attentive readings
not only of literary texts but also of book reviews and publishers'
marketing materials, Partridge enables us to chart and to
understand the changes in Chinese American literature and its
reception in the past fifty years. In doing so, he threads a new
path forward in the discussion of race and ethnicity in America,
one that encompasses the historical valence of multiculturalism and
the cross-fertilizing perspectives of postmodern hybridity theory
while remaining cognizant of the persistence of racist and
racialized thinking in contemporary American society. Beyond
Literary Chinatown demonstrates how Chinese American literature has
come to negotiate the tensions between the expression of ethnic
identity and a resistance to racialization. This important
contribution to the growing body of critical works on Asian
American literature will be of interest to reception theorists and
scholars of American ethnic studies and American literature.
|
American Knees (Paperback)
Shawn Wong; Introduction by Jeffrey F. L. Partridge
|
R502
R379
Discovery Miles 3 790
Save R123 (25%)
|
Out of stock
|
Read about the movie, Americanese, based on Shawn Wong's book, at:
http://www.americanesethemovie.com
|
|
Email address subscribed successfully.
A activation email has been sent to you.
Please click the link in that email to activate your subscription.