This volume analyzes innovative forms of media and music (art installations, television commercials, photography, films, songs, telenovelas) to examine the performance of migration in contemporary culture. Though migration studies and media studies are ostensibly different fields, this transnational collection of essays addresses how their interconnection has shaped our understanding of the paradigms through which we think about migration, ethnicity, nation, and the transnational. Cultural representations intervene in collective beliefs. Art and media clearly influence the ways the experience of migration is articulated and recalled, intervening in individual perceptions as well as public policy. To understand the connection between migration and diverse media, the authors examine how migration is represented in film, television, music, and art, but also how media shape the ways in which host country and homeland are imagined. Among the topics considered are new mediated forms for representing migration, widening the perspective on the ways these representations may be analyzed; readings of enactments of memory in trans- and inter-disciplinary ways; and discussions of globalization and transnationalism, inviting us to rethink traditional borders in respect to migration, nation states, as well as disciplines.

This volume analyzes innovative forms of media and music (art installations, television commercials, photography, films, songs, telenovelas) to examine the performance of migration in contemporary culture. Though migration studies and media studies are ostensibly different fields, this transnational collection of essays addresses how their interconnection has shaped our understanding of the paradigms through which we think about migration, ethnicity, nation, and the transnational. Cultural representations intervene in collective beliefs. Art and media clearly influence the ways the experience of migration is articulated and recalled, intervening in individual perceptions as well as public policy. To understand the connection between migration and diverse media, the authors examine how migration is represented in film, television, music, and art, but also how media shape the ways in which host country and homeland are imagined. Among the topics considered are new mediated forms for representing migration, widening the perspective on the ways these representations may be analyzed; readings of enactments of memory in trans- and inter-disciplinary ways; and discussions of globalization and transnationalism, inviting us to rethink traditional borders in respect to migration, nation states, as well as disciplines.

Relative Histories focuses on the Asian American memoir that specifically recounts the story of at least three generations of the same family. This form of auto/biography concentrates as much on other members of one's family as on oneself, generally collapses the boundaries conventionally established between biography and autobiography, and in many cases--as Rocio G. Davis proposes for the auto/biographies of ethnic writers--crosses the frontier into history, promoting collective memory. Davis centers on how Asian American family memoirs expand the limits and function of life writing by reclaiming history and promoting community cohesion. She argues that identity is shaped by not only the stories we have been told, but also the stories we tell, making these narratives important examples of the ways we remember our family's past and tell our community's story. In the context of auto/biographical writing or filmmaking that explores specific ethnic experiences of diaspora, assimilation, and integration, this work considers two important aspects: These texts re-imagine the past by creating a work that exists both in history and as a historical document, making the creative process a form of re-enactment of the past itself. Each chapter centers on a thematic concern germane to the Asian American experience: the narrative of twentieth-century Asian wars and revolutions, which has become the subtext of a significant number of Asian American family memoirs (Pang-Mei Natasha Chang's Bound Feet and Western Dress, May-lee and Winberg Chai's The Girl from Purple Mountain, K. Connie Kang's Home Was The Land of Morning Calm, Doung Van Mai Elliott's The Sacred Willow); family experiences of travel and displacement within Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which unveil a history of multiple diasporas that are often elided after families immigrate to the United States (Helie Lee's Still Life With Rice, Jael Silliman's Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames, Mira Kamdar's Motiba's Tattoos); and the development of Chinatowns as family spaces (Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men, Lisa See's On Gold Mountain, Bruce Edward Hall's Tea that Burns). The final chapter analyzes the discursive possibilities of the filmed family memoir ("family portrait documentary"), examining Lise Yasui's A Family Gathering, Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury's Halving the Bones, and Ann Marie Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam. Davis concludes the work with a metaliterary engagement with the history of her own Asian diasporic family as she demonstrates the profound interconnection between forms of life writing.

An analytically innovative work, ""Begin Here"" widens the current critical focus of Asian North American literary studies by proposing an integrated thematic and narratological approach to the practice of autobiography. It demonstrates how Asian North American memoirs of childhood challenge the construction and performative potential of national experiences. This understanding influences theoretical approaches to ethnic life writing, expanding the boundaries of traditional autobiography by negotiating narrative techniques and genre and raising complex questions about self-representation and the construction of cultural memory. By examining the artistic project of some fifty Asian North American writers who deploy their childhood narratives in the representation of the individual processes of self-identification and negotiation of cultural and national affiliation, this work provides a comprehensive overview of Asian North American autobiographies of childhood published over the last century. Importantly, it also attends to new ways of writing autobiographies, employing comics, blending verse, prose, diaries, and life writing for children, and using relational approaches to self-identification, among others.

Sites of Ethnicity brings together contributions from scholars in Canada, the U.K., Finland, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United States who share an interest in exploring the theoretical possibilities of site analysis and the crucial role of place and spatial tactics in multi-ethnic societies. The strategic means for deciphering total social facts-comprising broad issues such as travel, subject positioning, identity, ethnicity, culture, memory-are as diverse and wide-ranging as the contributors to this volume. Manifestations of ethnicity in literature and non-literary texts, music, food, TV series, photographs, and even gravesites, are revealed to be constructed, performed, eaten, remembered, desired, and imagined as important sites for a definition of both individual and collective identities that, when studied in-depth, prove consistently elusive, fluid, and always already deferred. The papers present a vision of a world that is increasingly a global village, one in which memory and local place help measure various forms of ethnic representation through a reflection of possible sites of cultural engagement and agency.