Description
Book SynopsisAsian American literature abounds with complex depictions of American cities as spaces that reinforce racial segregation and prevent interactions across boundaries of race, culture, class, and gender. This book provides the comprehensive examination to date of how Asian American writers - both celebrated and overlooked - depict urban settings.
Trade Review"Zhou expands the intellectual horizon by moving beyond the critique of ethnic enclave as simply space of marginalization and by arguing that Chinatown mutually constitutes and transforms the US city and provides an alternative space for Asian American everyday practice as well as reimagining of a national subject. . . . Highly recommended."
* Choice *
"Zhou tracks how authors such as Sui Sin Far, Lin Yutang, Fae Myenne Ng, and Frank Chin render alienated Asian immigrant characters as immersed in a series of urban interactions that on one level resists social marginalization and isolation and on another level imagines a sense of belonging, enacting a spatial citizenship and transforming the contours of being American... Zhou’s more ambitious aim is to show how Asian American literature reimagines and re-represents the American city... The close readings of novels are comprehensive and insightful."
* American Literature *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction | Contested Urban Space
1. “The Woman about Town”: Transgressing Raced and Gendered Boundaries in Sui Sin Far’s Writings
2. Claiming Right to the City: Lin Yutang’s Chinatown Family
3. “Our Inside Story” of Chinatown: Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone
4. Chinatown as an Embattled Pedagogical Space: Frank Chin’s Short Story Cycle and Donald Duk
5. Inhabiting the City as Exiles: Bienvenido N. Santos’s What the Hell for You Left Your Heart in San Francisco
6. The City as a “Contact Zone”: Meena Alexander’s Manhattan Music
7. “The Living Voice of the City”: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker
8. Mapping the Global City and “the Other Scene” of Globalization: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange
Conclusion | The I-Hotel and Other Places
Notes
Bibliography
Index
