China Fictions, English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story

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A. Robert Lee
Rodopi, 2008 - 350 pagini
The world is anything but unfamiliar with diaspora: Jewish, African, Armenian, Roma-Gipsy, Filipino/a, Tamil, Irish or Italian, even Japanese. But few have carried so global a resonance as that of China. What, then, of literary-cultural expression, the huge body of fiction which has addressed itself to that plurality of lives and geographies and which has come to be known as "After China"? This collection of essays offers bearings on those written in English, and in which both memory and story are central, spanning the USA to Australia, Canada to the UK, Hong Kong to Singapore, with yet others of more transnational nature.
This collection opens with a reprise of woman-authored Chinese American fiction using Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan as departure points. In turn follow readings of the oeuvres of Tan and Frank Chin. A comparative essay takes up novels by Canadian, American and Australian authors from the perspective of migrancy as fracture. Chinese Canada comes into view in accounts of SKY Lee, Wayson Choy, Evelyn Lau and Larissa Lai. Australia under Chinese literary auspices is given a comparative mapping through the fiction of Brian Castro and Ouyang Yu. The English language "China fiction" of Singapore and Hong Kong is located in essays centred, respectively, on Martin Booth and Po Wah Lam, and Hwee Hwee Tan and Colin Cheong. The collection rounds out with portraits of Timothy Mo as British transnational author, a selection of contextual Chinese British stories and art, and the phenomenon of "Chinese Chick Lit" novels. China Fictions/English Language will be of interest to readers drawn both to "After China" as diasporic literary heritage and comparative literature in general.

Din interiorul cărții

Pagini selectate

Cuprins

Acknowledgements
7
China Fictions After China Fictions
9
The Political and Literary Legacies of Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan
33
Loss and Forgiveness in the Novels of Amy Tan
57
The China Fictions of Frank Chin
79
Representations of Suicide in SKY Lees Disappearing Moon Café Fae Myenne Ngs Bone and HsuMing Teos Love and Vertigo
101
5 Chinatown as Diaspora Space in SKY Lees Disappearing Moon Cafe and Wayson Choys The Jade Peony
119
Evelyn Lau and Larissa Lai
141
Brian Castro Ouyang Yu and Chinese Australia
183
Martin Booths Gweilo and Po Wah Lams The Locust Hunter
205
Language Vision and Resonance in Hwee Hwee Tans Fiction
239
DisLocating Authority Culture and Identity in the Novels of Colin Cheong
259
Timothy Mos New World Disorder
279
The Politics and Poetics of Making a Home in Britain
299
Chick Lit and The New Crossover Fiction
327
Notes on Contributors
347

Nature Transfeminism and Diaspora in Larissa Lais Salt Fish Girl
161

Termeni și expresii frecvente

Pasaje populare

Pagina 206 - It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips
Pagina 49 - Long ago in China, knot-makers tied string into buttons and frogs, and rope into bell pulls. There was one knot so complicated that it blinded the knotmaker. Finally an emperor outlawed this cruel knot, and the nobles could not order it anymore. If I had lived in China, I would have been an outlaw knotmaker.
Pagina 163 - I see advertised The Primer of American Literature. Imagine the face of Philip or Alexander at hearing of a Primer of Macedonian Literature ! Are we to have a Primer of Canadian Literature too, and a Primer of Australian? We are all contributories to one great literature — English Literature. The contribution of Scotland to this literature is far more serious and important than that of America has yet had time to be; yet a "Primer of Scotch Literature
Pagina 85 - ... boys liked to con into singing for us. Come-on opera, we wanted from her, not them Shirley Temple tunes the girls wanted to learn, but big notes, high long ones up from the navel that drilled through plaster and steel and skin and meat for bone marrow and electric wires on one long titpopping breath. This is how I come home, riding a mass of spasms and death throes, warm and screechy inside, itchy, full of ghostpiss, as I drive right past what's left of Oakland's dark wooden Chinatown and dark...
Pagina 47 - ... been confusing. It also had something to do with birds. I was nine years old when the letters made my parents, who are rocks, cry. My father screamed in his sleep. My mother wept and crumpled up the letters. She set fire to them page by page in the ashtray, but new letters came almost every day. The only letters they opened without fear were the ones with red borders, the holiday letters that mustn't carry bad news. The other letters said that my uncles were made to kneel on broken glass during...
Pagina 121 - I argue that the concept of diaspora offers a critique of discourses of fixed origins, while taking account of a homing desire which is not the same thing 614 as desire for a 'homeland'.
Pagina 118 - Diaspora space is the point at which boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of 'us' and 'them', are contested. My argument is that diaspora space as a conceptual category is 'inhabited', not only by those who have migrated and their descendants, but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous.
Pagina 61 - It's my fault she is this way. I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these two things do not mix? I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it's no lasting shame. You are first in line for a scholarship. If the roof crashes on your head, no need to cry over this bad luck. You can sue anybody, make the landlord fix it.
Pagina 279 - The interactions among peoples of different civilizations enhance the civilization-consciousness of people that, in turn, invigorates differences and animosities stretching or thought to stretch back deep into history. Third, the processes of economic modernization and social change throughout the world are separating people from long-standing local identities. They also weaken the nation state as a source of identity. In much of the world, religion has moved in to fill this gap, often in the form...
Pagina 115 - I'm the stepdaughter of a paper son and I've inherited this whole suitcase of lies. All of it is mine. All I have is those memories, and I want to remember them all

Despre autor (2008)

A. Robert Lee is Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo, having previously taught at the University of Kent, UK. His publications include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998), Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award for 2004, Japan Textures: Sight and Word, with Mark Gresham (2007), and Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2008).

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