Intercultural dialogue

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 330-350
Author(s):  
Marilia Borges Costa
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Cultural Elements ◽  
Family Stories ◽  
Louis Althusser ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Chinese Descent ◽  
American Author ◽  
The Woman Warrior

The scientific breakthroughs of important theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, etc., engendered a new concept of subject. Instead of the centered and integrated Cartesian subject, the postmodern individual is fragmented and multiple, affected by ideology and by his/her unconscious. This makes it necessary to analyze the historical and psychological dimensions to apprehend his/her complexity. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The woman warrior — memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts, first published in 1976, it is possible to identify the multiple subject positionings of the main character, who is also the narrator. As a North American of Chinese descent, she portrays Chinese legends, myths, and family stories of her ethnic community through an American frame of mind. Growing up in the intersection of cultures, a position of in-between cultures, and having to deal with different customs and values, the narrator faces conflicts and paradoxes. Her contradictory and fragmentary identity reveals the hybrid and diasporic character of the Chinese American author. Kingston constantly brings together the discourses of her Chinese cultural heritage and the American ones presented in her environment. With this constant dialogue between different cultural elements, the narrator tries to forge a sense of wholeness, a unified cultural identity, of her various subjective positions. The result of this effort, however, is a culturally unstable identity: The woman warrior reflects the heterogeneous nature of the main character and the author, revealing to the reader the Chinese American “country” and culture in all its singularity and uniqueness. The theoretical framework used to analyze the different expressions of subjectivity in the main character of this fictional autobiography is based on critics of Postmodernism and on cultural studies about diasporas.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s Transpacific Imagination

2019 ◽  
pp. 172-187
Author(s):  
Yuan Shu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
The Woman Warrior ◽  
Critical Process ◽  
Narrative Role ◽  
Native Informant

In juxtaposing The Fifth Book of Peace with The Woman Warrior, this essay argues that Kingston has moved away from the narrative role as a native informant and presents a new multicultural United States by inventing a Chinese American epistemology and intervening in US imperialism around the globe. Such a move substantiates Mignolo’s theory of “global decolonial thinking,” a critical process that reclaims non-Western notions of humanity and epistemology.

scholarly journals Reconstructing the Past: Reproduction of Trauma in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Qiong He
Keyword(s):  
Chinese American ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
American Women ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chinese American Women ◽  
The Woman Warrior

This article interprets The Woman Warrior as reproduction and re-composition of unspeakable traumatic memories and experience of Chinese-American women who live in an uncanny world and in diasporic condition. Drawing on trauma theory, this article studies the effects of various traumas upon the psychology of characters and examines how Kingston utilizes intertextuality as a way of demonstrating traumatic repetition and promoting healing. Intertextually revising the Chinese legend enables characters to conflate the unspeakable experience into their cognitive systems and to reconstruct a past free from trauma.

scholarly journals ‘Exile, Secrecy, and Cunning’: Cultural Translation and Hybridity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

MANUSYA ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
Chutima Pragatwutisarn
Keyword(s):  
Chinese American ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Gendered Identity ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
The Woman Warrior

This article discusses the construction of Chinese-American identity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. Kingston’s book reveals the role of storytelling in the construction of ethnic (and gendered) identity as the author narrates her personal experiences through the reconstruction of myths, legends, and ‘talk stories’ she inherited from her mother. The method Kingston uses to make sense of these stories is that of translation. Translation refers to a performance of ethnic and gendered identity in Kingston’s narrative. Here the complex identity known as Chinese-American is not an accumulation of discrete, distinct cultures, ‘Chinese and American’. As a result of translating between these different positions, Chinese-American in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior designates a new identity, one that exposes the fictions of any closed categories, either Chinese or American. This process of self-definition is represented in terms of Kingston’s rewriting of stories of her ethnic culture in an attempt to reclaim them as her own and to make their meaning relevant to her American context. This Chinese-American identity as a product of discursive practice transcends the monolithic conception of Chinese and American cultures. It is in Kingston’s struggle to find her own voice that she tentatively combines the two cultures and reconciles herself with her mother.

Schooling Bilinguals In and Against Multiculturalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeehyun Lim
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Real World ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
George Washington ◽  
The Real ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Mexican Heritage ◽  
The Woman Warrior

Chapter three examines multicultural literary models of growing up in two languages through Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. By reading Paredes’s novel side-by-side Kingston’s widely discussed text, the chapter suggests that a syncretic bilingual personhood in which various anxieties of language’s value as property are worked out in relation to an ethnic subject’s formation is a key element of literary multiculturalism. The much-discussed controversy around The Woman Warrior recapitulates in the real world the fictional controversy over Guálinto’s betrayal of his Mexican heritage in George Washington Gómez as Asian American cultural nationalists accused Kingston of misrepresenting Chinese American experiences. In light of the conditions of bilingualism’s valorization and stigmatization in Paredes’s novel, the chapter revisits this controversy as ultimately symptomatic of the competing visions of bilingualism as cultural and human capital in multiculturalism.

“The Invisible World the Emigrants Built”: Cultural Self-Inscription and the Antiromantic Plots of The Woman Warrior

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-115
Author(s):  
Patricia Chu
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Cultural Self ◽  
The Woman Warrior ◽  
Chinese View

Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts both depicts and creates for its readers such an experience of strangeness that many non-Chinese-American readers view it as “exotic” and Chinese, some Chinese Americans dismiss it as a misrepresentation of Chinese-American experience, and most Chinese view it as American. As Kingston herself has noted, many of the book's early reviewers praised the book, yet inappropriately tried to draw general conclusions from it about Chinese Americans, or even Chinese (Kingston, “Cultural Mis-readings”). Chinese readers are likely to share the initial responses of Zhang Ya-jie, a scholar from the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) who felt that Kingston’s treatment of certain stories, especially the woman warrior story, was “somewhat twisted, Chinese perhaps in origin but not really Chinese any more, full of American imagination,” and was put off by the book’s expressions of bitterness toward Kingston’s mother and its generalizations about Chinese people (103). Perhaps in response, much Asian-American discussion has focused on the book's ethnic authenticity, rather than its poetic rendering of Kingston’s experience, as a quick survey of four Asian-American critical approaches may suggest.

scholarly journals Song of Chinese American Females- A Traumatic Reading of The Woman Warrior

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 171
Author(s):  
Zhao Qing
Keyword(s):  
Maxine Hong Kingston ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
American Writer ◽  
The Woman Warrior ◽  
Chinese American Immigrants

Maxine Hong Kingston is a famous Chinese American writer, who is adept at interpreting the living conditions of Chinese American immigrants by making vivid and profound description. She writes several influential novels and the publication of her masterpiece The Woman Warrior makes her immediately renowned in the American literary circle. This paper is going to apply trauma theory to describe the Chinese females’ miserable fates, to further explore the causes of their trauma, and to focus on how they treat trauma, overcome trauma and become “woman warriors”.

“At the Western Palace”: The Dehumanization of Whiteness, Americanness, and Chinese-Americanness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

2021 ◽  
pp. 105-116
Author(s):  
Klara Szmańko
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
White People ◽  
Woman Warrior ◽  
The Woman Warrior ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Chinese American Immigrants

The dehumanization of whiteness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) inheres in the overarching ghosthood metaphor. While first generation Chinese American immigrants in The Woman Warrior attribute the power of transforming people into ghosts to the United States of America as a country, the questioning of a person’s humanity by calling them a “ghost” is not reserved for white people alone. Chinese American immigrants also run the risk of losing their humanity and becoming ghosts if they renounce their relatives and their heritage. The husband of the first-person narrator’s Chinese aunt, Moon Orchid, is an example of a Chinese American man, who turns into a ghost on account of swapping his Chinese wife for a much younger American one. The clinic in which Moon Orchid’s husband works, a chrome and glass Los Angeles skyscraper, becomes a vehicle for the metaphoric representation of the United States as the Western Palace – also the title of the fourth of the five chapters of The Woman Warrior, exemplifying narrative techniques employed by Kingston in order to render the above mentioned dehumanization.

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