Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature

by Jinqi Ling

Overview

This book rereads five major works by John Okada, Louis Chu, Frank Chin, and Maxine Hong Kingston in order to reconceptualize the relationship between the past and present of post-WWII Asian American literary history. Drawing on work in cultural studies, postmodern and poststructuralist theory, social history, and neo-pragmatism, Ling offers fresh perspectives on the cultural politics and formal strategies of texts too often seen in recent criticism as devoid of complexities and fraught with totalizing implications. In challenging uncritical adoption of posthumanist views of history, agency, and identity in Asian American cultural criticism, this pioneering book opens an approach to Asian American literary texts that simultaneously registers their rich specificity and relatedness to works before and after.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195111163
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	06/28/1998
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

University of California, Los Angeles

Table of Contents

1. History, Entanglement, and Negotiated Change		3	(28)
2. Writing the Novel, Narrating Discontents: Race and Cultural Politics in John Okada's No-No Boy		31	(22)
3. Realist Intervention and the Return of the Repressed: Reading Class, Gender, and Culture in Louis Chu's Eat a Bowl of Tea		53	(26)
4. Performing the Margins: Ethics and the Poetics of Frank Chin's Theatrical Discourse		79	(31)
5. Maxine Hong Kingston's Remapping of Asian American Historical Imagination in China Men		110	(29)
6. Critical Negotiations: Issues in Asian American Cultural Studies		139	(24)
Conclusion		163	(4)
Notes		167	(20)
Bibliography		187	(16)
Index		203

Editorial Reviews

"Jinqi Ling's NARRATING NATIONALISMS liberates Asian American literature from the ideological strictures of academic postmodernism. Ling demonstrates how ideas about race, gender and class in the second half of the 20th century are shaped by Asian American writers in their works, as the writers themselves are consciously shaped by their social and political conditions. This is a vital text for understanding imagination and ideology in the formation of Asian American literature."— Russell C. Leong Editor, Amerasia Journal, UCLA

"Narrating Nationalisms is a valuable and original intervention into Asian American cultural controversies. The study engages in a tactful yet provocative manner with the current debates on Asian American cultural production, particularly the debates regarding the nature of its oppositional status vis-a-vis dominant American culture. Deploying relevant and erudite concepts on linguistic and cultural phenomenon to explore, elucidate and re-claim selected Asian American literary productions, it is marked by a syncretic and synthesizing power, clarity, and nimbleness.

[Lim cont] Ling covers a great deal of ground in a succinct and tightly argued manner, offering both the historicized cultural contexts of central Asian American textheoretical re-considerations on the traditions of realistic narrative and postmodern aesthetics. His book presents a model of interdisciplinary scholarship carefully constructed on clearly formulated and theoretically informed insights."—Shirley Lim, University of California, Santa Barbara

From the Publisher