scholarly journals Reading Japanese-American literature from the perspectives of the Capital and Race: Focusing on John Okada’s No-No Boy and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughters

2013 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 619-643
Author(s):  
JINIM PARK
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Japanese American Literature

Early Japanese American Literature, 1815–1900

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Way Leong
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Japanese Descent ◽  
Japanese American Literature

Early Japanese American literature is not just the sum total of literary works written by the first persons of Japanese descent in the United States. Nor is it just a set of texts where two pre-existing categories of “Japanese” and “American” national literature happened to overlap. Early Japanese American literature is best understood as an ideological terrain, an arena where later, taken-for-granted ideas about the boundaries of identities and literatures known as “Japanese” and “Japanese American” were first constructed. Due to the enduring legacies of single-nation and monolingual approaches to the study of modern literatures, only a handful of scholars have devoted serious comparative attention to the long history and formal breadth of literary production by persons of Japanese descent who traveled to or resided within the continental United States. In linguistic terms, early Japanese American literary production includes works written in Japanese, English, and other languages, such as classical Chinese, German, and Russian. In historical terms, the emergence of early Japanese American literature extends from travel narratives produced by castaways in the 1820s to the publication of full-fledged literary magazines and newspaper sections in the 1890s. In formal terms, early Japanese American literature includes literary forms that readers more familiar with European contexts might associate with early modernity, such as phrasebooks, essays on education, spiritual autobiographies, and diplomatic guides.

scholarly journals Strategic Hybridity in Early Chinese and Japanese American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Floyd Cheung
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese Character ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
Japanese American Literature

Early Chinese and Japanese American male writers between 1887 and 1938 such as Yan Phou Lee, Yung Wing, Sadakichi Hartmann, Yone Noguchi, and H. T. Tsiang accessed dominant US publishing markets and readerships by presenting themselves and their works as cultural hybrids that strategically blended enticing Eastern content and forms with familiar Western language and structures. Yan Phou Lee perpetrated cross-cultural comparisons that showed that Chinese were not unlike Europeans and Americans. Yung Wing appropriated and then transformed dominant American autobiographical narratives to recuperate Chinese character. Sadakichi Hartmann and Yone Noguchi combined poetic traditions from Japan, Europe, and America in order to define a modernism that included cosmopolitans such as themselves. And H. T. Tsiang promoted Marxist world revolution by experimenting with fusions of Eastern and Western elements with leftist ideology. Although these writers have been discounted by some critics as overly compromising in their attempts to reach Western readers, they accomplished laudable cultural work in their particular historical circumstances and provide insights into the varied and complicated negotiations of Asian American identity during the exclusion era.

Modernism and Asian American Writers

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Wu Clark
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Literary Anthologies ◽  
Political Solidarity

In her pathbreaking book Asian American Panethnicity (1992), Yen Le Espiritu traces Asian American panethnicity to the Yellow Power movement of the civil rights era of the 1960s. Thereafter the political struggles of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Filipino Americans were documented in literature and studied in literary anthologies such as Frank Chin et al.’s Aiiieeeee! (1974) and David Hsin-Fu Wand’s Asian-American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (1974). However, early Asian American literature suggests that Asian American consciousness emerged earlier than the civil rights era. During the era of Chinese exclusion (1882–1943), Chinese American writers such as Lee Yan Phou, Sui Sin Far, and Onoto Watanna—Sui Sin Far’s sister, who wrote under a Japanese pseudonym—wrote about Chinese American and Japanese American experiences. The subsequent era of Japanese exclusion (1907–1945) brought about the modernist haiku poetry of Japanese American writers Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the Popular Front era of the 1930s that various forms of panethnic and queer Asian American political consciousness emerged in the literature of Korean American writer Younghill Kang, Filipino American writers Carlos Bulosan (who mentions Kang in his novel, America Is In the Heart) and José García Villa, and Chinese American writer H. T. Tsiang. The politically progressive Popular Front of the 1930s, together with the influence of experimental literary forms of high modernism from just a decade before, set the stage for the Asian American panethnicity and queer consciousness that are described in the works of Kang and Bulosan, and Villa and Tsiang, respectively. Kang’s autobiographical novels The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937) and Bulosan’s novel, America Is in the Heart (1943) exhibit important thematic influences by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Likewise, Villa’s Have Come, Am Here (1942) and Tsiang’s novels The Hanging on Union Square (1935) and And China Has Hands (1937) demonstrate the influence of queer modernist Gertrude Stein. Just a few decades earlier, Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann were both writing modernist haikus that responded to those of their friend Ezra Pound. However, without the language of political solidarity that the Popular Front provided, Noguchi’s and Hartmann’s politics, implicit in their poetry, remained overlooked by critics until the 1990s.

Asian American Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 218-231
Author(s):  
Julia H. Lee
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Asian American Identity

This chapter examines the use of realism in Asian American literature and the debate surrounding its political and aesthetic meanings in Asian American literary criticism. Even though realist narratives have dominated Asian American literary history, the use and significance of realism nevertheless continue to stir controversy within the field. The chapter explores both sides of the “realism controversy” within Asian American studies and makes the case that realism exposes the contradictions of Asian American identity and that Asian American identity exposes the contradictions of realism. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara” (1950), focusing on how the author deploys a realist mode of narration to reveal the historically contingent process by which Japanese American identity and community in the internment era are constituted.

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