Moving Futures

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 502-518
Author(s):  
Angela Naimou
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Essay Review ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Us ◽  
Four Books ◽  
African Migrant ◽  
Border Politics ◽  
Critical Refugee Studies

AbstractThis essay-review discusses four books that link refugee migration and border politics to ideas of time. It reads Asfa-Wossen Asserate’s African Exodus (2018), Stephanie Li’s Pan-African American Literature (2018), Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures (2018), and Long T. Bui’s Returns of War (2018) as books with distinct objects of analysis, from refugee memory of the US war in Vietnam, to US literary and cultural speculative fictions, to African immigrant writers in the US, to the current so-called African migrant crisis as it affects Europe. It also considers the multiple disciplinary and methodological commitments of these books, as they participate in discussions on migration in such areas as ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, Asian American studies, critical refugee studies, scholarship on literature of African diasporas, economics, history, memory, and human rights. This essay-review considers the gains or limitations of such approaches to the study of migration in contemporary literature and/or culture.

The Unspeakable Speculative, Spoken

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 564-574
Author(s):  
Rebecca Wanzo
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Racial Representations ◽  
The Us ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Paradigm Shifting

Abstract Exploring various absences—what is or should not be represented in addition to the unspeakable in terms of racial representations—is the through line of three recent books about race and speculative fictions. Mark C. Jerng’s Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (2018) argues racial worldmaking has been at the center of speculative fictions in the US. In Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (2017), Kristen Lillvis takes one of the primary thematic concerns of black speculative fictions—the posthuman—and rereads some of the most canonical works in the black feminist literary canon through that lens. Lillvis addresses a traditional problem in the turn to discussions of the posthuman and nonhuman, namely, what does it mean to rethink black people’s humanity when they have traditionally been categorized as nonhuman? Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2018) speaks to the absence of a framework of disability in African American literature and cultural criticism. In addressing absence—or, perhaps silence—Schalk offers the most paradigm-shifting challenge to what is speakable and unspeakable: the problem of linking blackness with disability and how to reframe our treatment of these categories.

Introduction

Framed by War ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Susie Woo
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Korean Women ◽  
Adoption Studies ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Us Empire ◽  
Critical Refugee Studies

The introduction establishes the question at the heart of this book: How did Korean women and children become critical to the making of US empire in the early Cold War? It begins by situating Korea in the longer trajectory of US empire, which dates back centuries before US occupation of South Korea in 1945. Focusing on how children and intimacy historically played a role in empire building, the chapter describes how during the Korean War family frames were deployed to transform devastation into a tale of salvation, a cultural reconfiguration that enabled America’s reach to the Pacific. Yet Americans who anchored this project soon put internationalism into practice in ways that exceeded government intentions. Initially heralded for their humanitarian efforts, US servicemen, missionaries, and philanthropists transformed a rescue project over there into an immigration problem over here. Pushing to permanently bring Korean women and children into the United States, they were responsible for a return of empire that disrupted existing US gatekeeping policies and the domestic racial status quo. The introduction places the book in conversation with the fields of postcolonial studies, American studies, Asian American studies, critical adoption studies, and critical refugee studies to better understand these transnational processes.

scholarly journals A Visual Asian American Diaspora: Belle Yang’s Hannah is My Name (2004) and Guene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006)

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Marwa Essam Eldin Fahmi
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Ethnic Politics ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Visual Narratives ◽  
Visual Text ◽  
Iconic Signs ◽  
Chinese American Literature

<p>The current study aims at theorizing the question of identity within the framework of postcolonial studies in two visual narratives: Belle Yang’s <em>Hannah is My Name</em> (2004) and Guene Luen Yang’s <em>American Born Chinese</em> (2006). Asian American studies have recently interrogated identity marking a shift from ethnic nationalism to recognition of multiplicity. The study also seeks to counter <em>Orientalist</em> stereotypes in American literature through the analysis and examination of postcolonial Asian American Diaspora to highlight a number of questions: 1) How is the identity of the Asian immigrant’s hybrid visually constructed? 2) How can Asian American visuals be addressed in non-white children’s literature? 3) What nurtures the transnational imaginations of the authors/illustrators in question? 4) What are the ramifications of transnational perspectives on Asian American narratives? 5) What are the nature of belonging and citizenship? The questions are a vehicle to investigate the cultural and ethnic politics of Chinese American literature and to explore new forms of self-identification in American literary discourse. They also yield rich insights into how to practice <em>multiculturalism</em>. What draws the visual narratives in question together is their postcolonial theme of reformulated identity to unsettle dichotomies within Asian American community. Furthermore, the present study explores semiotic systems in terms of image syntax, gestural, spatial and iconic signs to examine the relation between the <em>denotative</em> context of the narrative text and the <em>connotation</em> of the visual text that creates <em>polysemous</em> illustrations and indefinite meaning-making.</p>

scholarly journals Five Times William Du Bois Travelled to the USSR

2021 ◽  
pp. 92-105
Author(s):  
Ol'ga Panova
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Gradual Transition ◽  
Social Experiment ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
The Us ◽  
African American Authors

Soviet contacts with African-American authors are an important part of both Soviet-Ame­rican literary contacts and African-American literature history. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963), the most prominent African-American thinker, writer, public figure of the 20th century, occupies a special place. He travelled to the USSR five times (1926, 1936, 1949, 1958–1959, 1962) and had repeatedly addressed the subject of Russia and the USSR in his letters, essays, and fiction. The incentive for Du Bois’ first visit to the USSR was his interest in the Revolution of 1917 and the Russian social experiment, namely, the solution to the race and ethnicity problem. The following visits allow tracing not only the evolution of Du Bois’ viewpoint (which became increasingly leftist), but also the development of his public and literary reputation in the Soviet Union — from wariness (for Du Bois being a liberal and unreliable associate) to honoring him as a major African-American classic and a great friend of the USSR. The fact that William Du Bois had joined the US Communist Party six month before his death and his relocation from the US to Ghana finalized the Soviet idealistic attitude towards the writer’s life. The essence of Du Bois’ journey was perceived as a gradual transition from errors and misconceptions to a more complete acceptance of Marxism-Leninism.

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices

2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Quan Manh Ha
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Racial Issues ◽  
Black Voices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
One Year ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. “The New Black Aesthetic,” an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on “the future of African American artistic expression” in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed and such female realist writers as Alice Walker.2 Thus, Ellis's primary purpose in writing Platitudes is to redefine how African Americans should be represented in fiction, implying that neither of the dominant approaches can completely articulate late-twentieth-century black experience when practiced in isolation. In its final passages, Platitudes represents a synthesis of the two literary modes or styles, and it embodies quite fully the diversity of black cultural identities at the end of the twentieth century as it extends African American literature beyond racial issues. In this way, the novel exemplifies the literary agenda that Ellis suggests in his theoretical essay.

Uncommon Grounds

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Latin American Literature ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The Us

This chapter turns from a historical account of the development of the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of reading to a textual analysis of the US and Latin American historical novel. Hemispheric/inter-American scholars often cite William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as exemplifying instances of literary borrowing across the North–South divide. As I demonstrate, however, each of the later texts also realigns its predecessor’s historical imaginary according to the dominant logics of the US and Latin American literary fields. Whereas the American works foreground experiential models of reconstructing the past and conveying knowledge across generations, García Márquez’s Latin American novel presents reading as the fundamental mode of comprehending and transmitting history.

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