The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Experimental Theater ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Comprehensive Collection ◽  
Literary Classics

In the past four decades the field of Asian American literary and cultural studies has grown enormously, expanding its areas of inquiry beyond the reflections on national identity and citizenship to encompass such issues as transnational and diasporic identities and communities; the workings of imperialism; the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality; and social justice/human rights in a global context. This project is the largest and most comprehensive collection of scholarship on Asian American literature and culture to date. From Asian American literary classics to experimental theater, from K-pop to online gaming, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture guides both established scholars and readers new to this study through the extensive landscape of Asian American writing and cultural production. More than one hundred essays on varied historical periods, geographical locales, and artistic modes offer an extensive examination of racial representation and activism, interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to literary work, ethnic communities, space and place, transnational and transpacific flows, and genres such as speculative fiction, the detective novel, and melodrama. Along with literary works from the late-19th century to the 21st century, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture covers a wide-ranging selection of Asian American theatre, dance, music, visual arts, film, television, and media. With its illuminating and profound commentary on Asian American writing and artistic practice, the volumes survey the historical foundations of this rich field, showing the exciting and profound new directions that currently drive the study of Asian American literary and cultural traditions.

Human Rights and Asian American Literature and Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal Parikh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late 20Th Century

Asian American literature and art have had an illuminating effect on the significance of human rights in the United States and in national culture. Americans are often assumed to enjoy exceptional liberties and rights, which they seek in turn to deliver to other people, in other parts of the world. However, Asian American cultural critique provides an incisive perspective on the limits of citizenship and national belonging as the basis for the granting of fundamental human freedoms, rights, and protections to all persons. The legal exclusion of Asians from immigration and naturalization, as well as from other forms of social and economic security such as property ownership, has long been justified through the construction of Asian racial difference. Reforms in immigration law after World War II, which did eventually transform Asian American life in the United States, took place in the context of a “global Cold War,” and during the same period that saw the institution of an international human rights regime. “Integration” proved as essential a mandate in US domestic and foreign policy as did “containment” in this global conflict. As a result, not only has the Asian American population grown significantly and become more heterogeneous since the late 20th century, the nation has seen the flourishing of Asian American literary and cultural production. Asian American writers and artists have been especially keen to investigate the political, legal, and ideological tensions and contradictions that pervade the postsocialist world and the war on terror. Their works explore the political precarity faced by those caught between the contradictions of neoliberal multiculturalism, the logics and technologies of state security, and the legal tethering of human rights to citizenship.

Illness, Disability, and Wounded Embodiment in Asian American Literature and Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Kyung-Jin Lee
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
Critical Index ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
A Site ◽  
Forms Of Violence

Alongside readings of Asian American literature that foreground the racial, gender, class, and transnational constitution of the community and the writers that produced literary work, one may consider how ill, disabled, and wounded embodiment work their way into the literature as well. Indeed, one might go as far to say that these differential modes of embodiment are constitutive of the corpus of Asian American literature itself, for illness and disability are often, though not always, the somatic expression of the kinds of racial and other forms of violence that Asian American authors take up as central themes. To explore the world of illness and disability and to pay attention to the ways that wounded embodiment figures in the literary provide a critical index of how Asian Americans have been and are valued. Moreover, to take the Asian American ill and disabled body in literature seriously as producing specific narratives themselves, rather than merely more deficient versions of those produced by their able-bodied counterparts, is to read Asian American literature as a site through which new ideas of sociality, intersubjectivity, and care might be possible, which then may trigger new political imaginations. Whether reading in Asian American literature’s most historical and canonical works traces of illness, disability, and wounded embodiment’s marks or the early-21st-century “boom” in nonfiction that attends to questions of illness and disability, death and dying, a generative, even capacious, understanding of Asian America emerges from the shadows of what was previously known and knowable as a social identity.

North Korea in Asian American Literature and Culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Hong
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Korean American ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
The Korean War

To the extent North Korea features within Asian American literature and culture, it primarily does so in a body of Korean American cultural production—memoirs, biographies, documentary films, oral histories, fiction, and multi-media political advocacy—that is distinctively post-9/11 but not-yet post-Korean War. The irresolution of the Korean War, a war that has yet to be ended by a peace treaty, serves as defining extraliterary context for representations of North Korea. Not reducible to historical setting, much less an event safely concluded in the past, the Korean War, as a contemporaneous structure of enmity between the United States and North Korea, conditions the significance of this cultural archive—its urgency, politics, and reception. Often markedly instrumental in nature, indeed defined by the antithetical political ends it wishes to foster, Asian (mainly Korean) American cultural production on North Korea falls into two broad camps: on the one hand, “axis of evil” accounts that advocate, at times explicitly, for US intervention against North Korea, and on the other, more emergent cultural expressions that seek to expose the human costs of unending US war with North Korea.

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