Literary Criticism : Asian

This volume is a survey of modern Chinese literature in the second half of the 20th century. It has three goals: to introduce figures, works, movements, and debates that constitute the dynamics of Chinese literature from 1949 to the end of the century; to depict the enunciative endeavors, ranging from ideological treatises to avant-garde experiments, that inform the polyphonic discourse of Chinese cultural politics; and to observe the historical factors that enacted the interplay of literary (post)modernities across Chinese communities in the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas. more...

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In narratives dominated by money, exchange is the route to Asian American visibility more...

Price: $45.00

Originally published in 1932, Kathleen Tamagawa’s pioneering Asian American memoir is a sensitive and thoughtful look at the personal and social complexities of growing up racially mixed during the early twentieth century. Born in 1893 to an Irish American mother and a Japanese father and raised in Chicago and Japan, Tamagawa reflects on the difficulty she experienced fitting into either parent’s native culture. She describes how, in America, her every personal quirk and quality was seen as quintessentially Japanese and how she was met unpredictably with admiration or fear—perceived as a “Japanese doll” or “the yellow menace.” When her family later moved to Japan, she was viewed there as a “foreigner” and remained an outsider in that country, as well. As an adult she came back to the United States as an American diplomat’s wife, but had trouble feeling at home in any place. This edition, which also includes Tamagawa’s recently rediscovered short story, “A Fit in Japan,” and a critical introduction, will challenge readers to reconsider how complex ethnic identities are negotiated and how feelings of alienation limit human identification in any society. more...

Price: $20.00

Winner of the Nobel Prize, Naipaul has traveled throughout the world, looking at its varied cultures and seeking out others' stories, recording and transforming them. His engagement with postcolonial cultures informs his novels, such as Guerrillas and A Bend in the River . However, it is his documentaries (such as Among the Believers and Beyond Belief ) and his works that combine actual and fictional histories and memories ( Finding the Center, The Enigma of Arrival , and A Way in the World ) that best exhibit a growing awareness of the complexities of cultural difference and the incompleteness and uncertainty of understanding 'strangers'. more...

Price: $18.35