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The Heart of Hyacinth, originally published in 1903, tells the coming-of-age story of Hyacinth Lorrimer, a child of white parents who was raised from infancy in Japan by a Japanese foster mother and assumed to be Eurasian. A crisis occurs when, 18 years after her birth, her American father returns to Japan to reclaim her just as Hyacinth has become engaged to a Japanese aristocrat, and she forcefully asserts her Japanese ties only to find that her prospective father-in-law will not tolerate a white wife for his son. Onoto Watanna creates in her protagonist a young white woman who not only claims a Japanese identity but shifts between her Japaneseness and her whiteness as expediency dictates. In this novel Watanna is on the cutting edge of what we now call race theory, using that theory—of racial constructions and fluidity—in the service of an avant-garde feminism.
This book grows out of the question, "What is South Asian American writing and what insights can it offer us about living in the world at this particular moment of tense geopolitics and inter-linked economies?" South Asian American literature, with its focus on the multiple geographies and histories of the global dispersal of South Asians, pulls back from a close-up view of the United States to reveal a wider landscape of many nations and peoples. Drawing on the cosmopolitan sensibility of scholars like Anthony Appiah, Vinay Dharwadker, Martha Nussbaum, Bruce Robbins, and Amartya Sen, this book argues that to read the body of South Asian American literature justly, one must engage with the u...
Hinting at Rimbaud’s provocative dictum that “I is an other,” this anthology discusses a wide-ranging array of twentieth-century and contemporary minority American modes of life writing, prompted by the following questions: Who (else) hides behind this “I” that the author-narrator-character “contractually” claims to be? What generic, aesthetic, political and socio-cultural issues are at stake in a conception of the self as other? The essays analyze autobiographical works from major Native American writers (John Milton Oskison and Louise Erdrich), an African American music-hall artist (Josephine Baker) and writers (John Edgar Wideman and Ta-Nehisi Coates), Caribbean American wri...
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 eighth volume in the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage series, which focuses on the literary heritage of Hispanics in the geographic area that has become the U.S. from the colonial period to 1960.
Superbly written and informed by decades of research, Liberal Hearts and Coronets is the first biography to treat John Campbell Gordon as seriously as his better-known wife, Ishbel Marjoribanks Gordon.
This collection of essays and poems examines various recent literary texts and cultural arenas in North America and the Asia and Pacific regions for what they reveal of the ongoing struggles of indigenous people and people of colour for justice and autonomy.
This book studies literary regionalism and it shows that one of the ways we imagine the world is through writing and reading about particular places. It explores how writers are shaped by particular places and how their stories shape our understanding of localities and the globe.
How should we understand Victorian conflict? The Victorians were divided between multiple views of the political, religious and social issues that motivated their changing aspirations. Such debates are a fundamental aspect of the literature of the period and these essays propose new ways of understanding their significance.
This book examines the ‘cultural apparatus’ of Human Rights in India today. It unravels discourses of victimhood, oppression, suffering and witnessing through a study of autobiographies, memoirs, reportage and media coverage, and documentaries. Moving across multiple media and genres for their representations of Dalits, riot victims, prisoners, abused and abandoned women and children, examining the formal properties of victim texts for their documentation of trauma, and analyzing the role of the sympathetic imagination, Writing Wrongs inaugurates a whole new field in literary–cultural studies by focusing on the narratives that build the culture of Human Rights. It argues for taking thi...