Asian American Literature

This study investigates how non-academic readers engage with Asian American literature through AI-assisted sentiment analysis of online reviews of Celeste Ng's novels. Ng's novels represent two motifs in the genre: one centred on Asian American experiences and the other situated in a multicultural context. Keyword analysis identifies frequently discussed aspects in reader reviews, including overall evaluation, literary elements (such as characterisation, plot, theme, setting, and authorial style), and comparative discourse on Ng's work. Assisted by the large language model ChatGPT, sentiment analysis of these aspects uncovers the affective and critical undercurrents in public reception. Specifically, the narrative about Asian American experiences elicits varying degrees of empathy, depending on readers' identities and perceptions of the characters' ethnic experiences. When the narrative is set in a multicultural context, readers underscore the importance of skilful plotting in satisfying their curiosity. However, both writing modes draw criticism for abrupt endings, reflecting readers' expectations for resolved conflicts and clear character epiphanies. These findings suggest authors should create relatable characters, develop compelling plots, provide sensible resolutions, and clarify character growth. Methodologically, this study showcases the potential of ChatGPT for literary criticism and opens new avenues for human-AI partnered research.

This essay attempts to demonstrate how Louis Adamic's material and intellectual influence, as well as his textual model, contributed to the writing of the Filipino American foundational text, Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946), a classic of Asian American literature. Starting with the renowned friendship between the two authors and emphasizing Adamic's support in guiding Bulosan through the ethnic expectations of the US editorial market-with the suggestion of the autobiographical genre-, this essay argues that Bulosan's employment and subversion of the immigrant autobiography was partly modeled on Adamic's semi-autobiography Laughing in the Jungle (1932), a heterodox European immigrant autobiography centered on class issues, social struggle, and the deconstruction of the American dream. The essay offers a brief comparative recognition of immigrant autobiographies written by European and Asian immigrants and their different canonical understanding through the classic works by William Boelhower and Elaine H. Kim. Then, drawing from archival materials and intertextual analysis, the essay argues that America Is in the Heart's structure, the narrator's skepticism toward assimilation policies and his attachment to the country of origin, are indebted to Adamic's influence because of formal and thematic similarities with his semi-autobiography. Nonetheless, the US colonial history Enrico Mariani of the Philippines and the author's background rooted in rural Pangasinan, set Bulosan's text apart from both the European American and Asian American autobiographical "traditions" and thus from the model of Younghill Kang-even though the two undergo the same racial prejudice by the editorial market. America Is in the Heart subverts the immigrant autobiographical genre by re-signifying the concept of "America," juxtaposing American ideals with the harsh realities of violent exploitation and discrimination experienced by Filipino migrant workers. In doing so, it reframes "America" as a symbol of solidarity between racialized workers against the fascist corporate manifestations that worried Adamic in the 1930s.

This article examines the narrative poetics and thematic concerns in Chinese American literature through a comparative analysis of the writings by Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Celeste Ng. The article interprets how these authors recount the between-world experiences of Chinese Americans across generations by employing distinct narrative strategies: spatial forms, temporal alternations, and intriguing narrative progression. Kingston's historical narrative, China Men, details a description of spaces for historical authenticity of early laborers' experiences and uses a fragmented narrative collage to mirror their bewilderment between the "promised" America and their hometown. Characterized by temporal alternation, Tan's mnemonic narrative, The Bonesetter's Daughter, portrays how the American-born Chinese daughter untangles present dilemmas through an excursion into personal and familial history. Ng initiates her mystery narrative, Everything I Never Told You, with the unexplained death of a mixed-race adolescent and thereby engages readers in piecing together the factors that shaped her fraught navigation between the harsh reality and idealized fantasies. In the first comparative study of works by these three authors through a narratological lens, we attempt to integrate cultural analysis with literary hermeneutics to trace the evolving portrayal of Chinese American experiences.

This essay argues that Ocean Vuong foregrounds character over identity in his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous-not only to voice the unevenness created by US imperialism, racial violence, and refugee selection, but also to refashion the marginal positioning that refugees are accorded in conventional representations-through his relentless attention to beauty. Although "usefulness" is not a concept usually paired with beauty, Vuong's elegant transformation of the enduring trials of refugee life can be read as a pragmatic and calculated intervention into the aesthetic structures and readerly desires under which refugee stories are usually consumed.

The current paper examines the character of Gauri, the protagonist in Jhumpa Lahiri's 2013 novel The Lowland, through the lens of liberal feminism, addressing a gap in existing literature that has largely focused on intersectional, spatial, and postcolonial readings. Liberal feminism advocates equal rights and opportunities for women within existing social structures, and this study explores how Gauri's pursuit of education, marital autonomy, and career independence embodies these principles in a diasporic context. Drawing on the works of Wollstonecraft (2009) and Friedan (1963), this analysis positions Gauri's choices against the backdrop of patriarchal norms, widowhood stigma, and migration. Often perceived as selfish, Gauri instead emerges as a complex figure whose resistance is enacted through self-determination and the rejection of prescribed gender roles. By contextualizing her agency within both Indian reformist traditions and contemporary transnational debates, the paper demonstrates the continued relevance of liberal feminism for interpreting women's strategies of survival and empowerment in South Asian literature.

Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016) is a
poignant collection that bridges personal experience with
broader historical and cultural contexts, particularly those of
war, migration, and queerness. This paper employs Edward
Said’s concept of contrapuntal reading to critically analyze
Vuong's poetry, exploring how Vuong’s personal narratives of
exile, trauma, and identity intersect with global histories of
war, imperialism, and cultural displacement. Contrapuntal
reading encourages readers to acknowledge the intertwined
nature of personal and political histories, amplifying
marginalized voices in the process. This paper argues that
Vuong’s poetry presents a counter-history to the dominant
narratives of the Vietnam War and immigration, offering a
nuanced perspective that complicates traditional views of
national identity, memory, and belonging. The analysis will
focus on how Vuong’s poetic language resists hegemonic
structures of power, particularly through his exploration of
language, queerness, and the legacy of war.

Constructed around literary representations of four ecological formations – desert, island, ocean, and swamp – this chapter explores how Asian American and Pacific Islander literary representations of these environments have contributed materially and conceptually to the shaping of Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Using these environments as a framework for cultural analysis allows for an exploration of multifaceted and complex Asian American identities that define themselves not only in terms of their entanglement with shifting categories of race and citizenship within the US, but also in terms of how these categories intersect and interact with the expansion of US geopower worldwide. If the development of US global hegemony during the twentieth century was intimately tied to a political geography that framed deserts, islands, oceans, and swamps as discrete territorial units that could be managed and controlled, literary representations of these same environments by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have worked to highlight the ways that they often escaped or exceeded this dominant paradigm of containment.

This study adopts a transnational lens in its analysis of what “home” meant to Japanese Americans by analyzing writings by an Issei [first/immigrant generation] woman, Hatsuye Egami (1902–1961). Egami was a writer/journalist in the prewar Japanese-language literature circle in Los Angeles. She kept an “evacuation” diary in the Tulare Assembly Center, which was translated and published in English in 1995. In the Gila River War Relocation Center, Egami was involved in the publication of the Japanese language section of the camp newspaper, The Gila News Courier, in which she wrote a serial column titled “Fujin no Sekai” [Women’s World]. By juxtaposing her life experiences with her fiction and non-fiction writings, this chapter elucidates how this Issei woman strove to create a feeling of home for herself, her family, and other Japanese Americans in their forced relocation, and at the same time, searching for ways to liberate her community from the restrictive notion of home deriving from the culture of her homeland. This chapter unpacks how multi-layered notions of home empowered Egami in her resistance against the intersectional oppression of racism and sexism.

Multi-cultural countries provide us a chance to rethink on issues such as race, ethnicity, identity, language and colour consciousness which are very important to determine the racial or national identity. Canada is a land of different cultures; several racial and cultural people can be seen there. In such countries specially people, who came from inter-mixing of race and culture, could not easily claim their identity. From that point of view Fred Wah is considered as a notable writer by his culturally mixed background. He questions it and justifies himself through racial differences. He proclaims as he is Chinese-Canadian. Like Fred Wah there are many more writers having ethnic, racial, and cultural differences. These differences lead us to raise questions of self-identity, nationality and the problems to maintain the double-ness. So we have to compare other Chinese-Canadian authors with Fred Wah to find out differences and similarities.

The ideal of social justice in the United States has its roots in both the Judeo Christian and ancient Greek traditions. From the latter our notion of democracy as a just institution is derived. At the theoretical level, Plato attempted to define ideal justice in his Republic, but here we are not concerned with ideal justice. At the practical level, the Hebrew prophet Amos urged public officials to practice justice as enjoined by Moses and his predecessors. Some 2700 years later Martin Luther King, Jr., sought to combine these two senses of justice when he insisted that America can satisfy its democratic creed-that all men are created equal only when it "allows justice to roll like water and righteousness like a mighty stream." Like the lonely prophet Amos, King was a voice for the toiling masses. This special issue of Explorations in Ethnic Studies is concerned with what may be called "ethnic justice," by which we have in mind the combination of the above two traditions, understoo d within the context of ethnic minorities in the United States. Thus, justice may be defined as the practices and policies that prohibit unequal treatment of people based on race, ethnicity, or color of skin. Ethnic justice in the modem sense is often mistakenly associated with Mfirma tive Action, which many opponents call "reverse justice," Le. reverse dis crimination. Noel J. Kent's "A Stacked Deck: Minorities, Social Justice and the New American Political Economy," is a neat point of departure. He examines justice

What does the prominence of cuteness as an aesthetic category amid US-Chinese codependency and rivalry tell us about the global population's attachments and desires? Under what circumstances do cute objects become facilitators of the cruel optimism that structures the relation between a slowly dying population and its toxic world; and, on the 7/30/25, 7:15 PM Cuteness: The Aesthetic Category of a Dystopic Global Asia -Social Text aesthetic-category-of-a-dystopic-global-asia/ 1/6

A. Robert Lee (ed.), Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, , $.). Pp. . ISBN     . A. Robert Lee's collection of essays on Karen Tei Yamashita is organized around the thorny question of how to categorize Yamashita's fictions into existing genres. The essays' analyses suggest that traditional genre categorizations are inadequate to explain Yamashita's literary interventions, or they draw on theories from outside literary studies to account for Yamashita's avant-garde aesthetics. In so doing, the essays succeed in fulfilling Lee's intended aim of showcasing the "virtuosity" of Yamashita's imagination (). For instance, the first chapter, by Cyrus R. K. Patell, situates Yamashita's oeuvre in the context of what he calls "emergent literature," a genre that he says "can serve as a remedy to some problems posed by contemporary multiculturalism … that insist on separate ethnic, racial and sexual traditions" (). For Patell, Brazil Maru (), Circle K (), I Hotel (), and Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance () are examples of emergent literature that put the local stories of Asian immigrants in Japan, the US, and Brazil into transnational contexts. Another attempt to put content and form together for the understanding of Yamashita's transnational fictions is chapter  by Ruth Y. Hsu, which uses vocabulary from chaos theory, including "fractals" and "butterfly effect" (), to explain the disparate-seeming and yet intricately connected plotlines in Tropic. Sandwiched between these two chapters are chapters that constitute a second narrative arc in Lee's collection, one that draws attention to the material traces that globalization left behind. John B. Gamber's chapter is the standout example; it examines how Through represents a jungle of nonbiodegradable junk like plastic "remains" and shows, in turn, a global ecological system that is forever "remade" by it (). Bella Adams's chapter is also worthy of attention. Centering on Yamashita's Through and Ruth Ozeki's Meat (), the chapter reads the novels as climate fictions ("cli-fis") that push back against what critic Ursula K. Heise calls the trope of the "ecological family romance" ()a tendency that some novels about the environment have in eliding natural crises from the center of the narrative with family reconciliation at Reviews 

This article reads Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land (1996) as a work of metafamily fiction. Troubling the conventional interpretation of Mona as a novel of intergenerational conflict that concludes with a happy ending, this article argues that the novel can be more meaningfully understood as a satirical commentary on traditional forms of the immigrant family romance. The argument draws on Sianne Ngai's work on tone to shed light on the perfunctory-ness in the narrator's voice in the "epilogue," and to re-interpret that section as a metafictional element which Jen attached to Mona to appease the editorial imperatives of the neoliberal market, while indicating her own authorial position's embeddedness in that same market's appetite for good feelings from Asian American literature. The article further employs Jonathan Flatley's theory of counter-mood to re-position "Chapter 15: Discoveries" as the more sincere ending within Mona. In that chapter, Jen subverts the idealization of the model minority family by presenting an anti-resolution that resists the positive affect of narrative closure as part of her critique of normative familial aesthetics which political conservatism began to agitate for in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.

There was a lot of overlap between my experiences growing up and the superhero genre-the genre was established by children of Jewish immigrants, growing up in New York and Cleveland. A lot of superhero stories are about being outsiders. Superman is literally an alien and an immigrant. And a lot of the superhero genre is about negotiating between two identities, which really mirrored my own life. I used one name at home, another one at school, had one language at home, another one at school. Something about those characters still resonated. In explaining the ways narratives and characters created by Jewish immigrant artists resonated with him, Yang reveals that cross-identification was key to his youthful consumption of superhero comics. However, as a graphic novelist, Yang has set himself the task of creating superhero comics that reflect Asian American experience, thereby allowing Asian American readers enjoyment that does not depend on cross-identification. In his elaboration in the online magazine Inverse about the significance of Asian American representation in superhero comics, Yang says that ''there's something affirming about seeing a reflection of yourself within the story you are reading. . . . When you grow up not seeing your life reflected, you have a fear that what you're experiencing is unimportant'' (Francisco). Yang's effort to incorporate the living and lived experiences of Asians .

know him?"). The photo appeared on the Umbrella Movement Information Archive on October 17, 2019, 1 three days after a citywide rally that sought to pressure the United States Congress to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019, which imposes sanctions on those who violate the autonomy of Hong Kong. Beneath the photo is the following appeal: "Since there are lawyers trying to bail the boy out, and his parents have not been forthcoming with his information, assistance from adults who can serve as his new guardian is vital to releasing him from the police station." According to research cited by Inkstone, a news outlet sponsored by South China Morning Post, "Almost two-fifths of the 12231 protectors cumulatively polled in 19 protests from June to were younger than 24 and about 11.8% of them were 19 or below" (Lam 2019). Supporters of self-determination point to the number of youths among the ranks of protesters as proof of the pure, self-evident rightness of the pro-democracy cause, while their pro-establishment opponents, like the anonymous local interviewee cited in Vox (Kirby 2019), insist that the youthfulness of so many of the demonstrators explains why they are eas-

Taking a cue from Pheng Cheah's discussion of nationalism's paradoxical relation to life and death and his invocation of the idea of spectral haunting (in light of the Deleuzian "nonorganic vitalism") as the genuine source of life in postcolonial cultures, this article conceives a life-begetting Asian American ethno-politics via a reading of the ethno-and biopolitics represented in Ruth Ozeki's novel All Over Creation. I argue that All Over Creation intervenes in the discussion of Asian American ethno-politics of life and death not simply because it engages with food politics and advocates agricultural biodiversity, but also because it creates narrative linkages between biodiversity and ethno-diversity. First, by telling the story of a Japanese war bride, All Over Creation brings to the fore Japanese war brides to emphasize their significance as the "ghostly figures"-or "random seedlings"-occupying the margins of both Asian American and white communities. Moreover, the novel introduces "seed-dissemination" as a(n) (agri)cultural logic that makes "Asian American" less a category of hereditary permanence than an avenue for one to generate and become others. All Over Creation spells out affirmative life forces that sprawl from the migratory trajectories of people and seeds (or "people as seeds")-trajectories that bring disorganizing force to the inherited logic or vertical continuity of both agricultural and ethnic cultural productions with lateral networking and changeable relationships.

In this article, I propose a discernable shift in the American discursive framework surrounding North Korea and the United States' relationship to North Koreans; namely, moving from projecting North Koreans as absolutely unassimilable foreign objects to then considering them as a potential new wave of immigrant Americans. I contend that political and cultural discourses on North Koreans in the US must be understood within the context of Cold War logics, specifically a lingering unease related to the unresolved Korean War and the US role in perpetuating it. I analyze legal and cultural discourses surrounding North Korean defectors in the United States, and how these are reflected in North Korean defector Yeonmi Park's memoir, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girls' Journey to Freedom (2015), and Korean American writer Suki Kim's investigative journalism, Without You, There is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite (2015). My analysis invites a rethinking of the ongoing repercussions of the Korean War and the legacies of the Cold War in constructing national and transnational Korean subjects in the Korea(s) and the United States.

Long recognized as one of America's foremost men of letters, Robert Penn Warren continues to dazzle us with his many-sided genius. In the haunting images of his poetry, the narrative power of his fiction, the revealing insights of his essays, we find literary achievement of the highest order.

Warren's writing has merited the close attention of literary critics. In this book Neil Nakadate brings together the most important critical essays, including a new essay written for this volume, to give a comprehensive view of the range of Warren's work. A list of Warren's published works, 1929-1980, and a useful checklist of critical works on Warren's writing supplement this rich and balanced collection of essays.

Contributors: A.L. Clements, Chester E. Eisinger, Norton R. Girault, Robert B. Heilman, H.P. Heseltine, James H. Justus, Richard Law, Frederick P.W. McDowell, Neil Nakadate, Ladell Payne, M. Bernetta Quinn, John Crowe Ransom, Victor Strandberg, Walter Sullivan, William Tjenos, Simone Vauthier, and Robert Penn Warren

The racial hierarchy of the nineteenth century United States evaluated the immigrant according to certain cultural and racial traits and in doing so created a heavily Protestant, white nativist space that subjugated many immigrants of other beliefs and races. The Irish and Italian immigrants were white and yet the dominant Catholic population of the two, as well as the high population of unskilled laborers among them, put them into a very questionable place. The correction and the conversion of the immigrant became such an essential part of these two immigrant groups that both fictional and autobiographical literatures of the two featured these subjects. In order to understand the similarities and differences in the immigration experience and its reflection in the immigrant literature, this study analyzes two narratives each from Italian and Irish immigrant literatures. Father Hugh Quigley's The Cross and the Shamrock and Father John Roddan's John O'Brien, Or, The Orphan of Boston, A Tale of Real Life are examples of mid-nineteenth century Irish immigrant literature with their didactic scope, and Pascal D'Angelo's The Son of Italy and Constantine M. Panunzio's The Soul of an Immigrant demonstrate early-twentieth century reception of the Italian immigrant as successors of the Irish. An analysis of these four texts will indicate how the authors of these texts represented the  Ankara Üniversitesi, Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi, Amerikan Kültürü ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı,

This article examines how Celeste Ng's novel Little Fires Everywhere deconstructs the American Dream by revealing the racial and class-based binaries that shape inclusion, power, and identity in suburban America. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's theory of deconstruction, Edward Said's Orientalism, Lisa Lowe's critique of the model minority myth, and Homi Bhabha's concept of the third space, this article argues that Ng reveals the illusion of equal opportunity by exposing how conformity to white, middle-class norms becomes the price of belonging. By using a nonlinear narrative, complex character dynamics, and a critique of commodified diversity, the novel questions the promise of equal opportunity and shows how privilege is maintained through exclusion. Ng's novel challenges the binary logics of success versus failure and insider versus outsider, revealing how marginalized characters resist and reframe the terms of belonging within structures of conditional inclusion.

Adaptations ghost Shakespeare’s text, and Shakespearean motifs ghost contemporary literature. Em Liu’s novel, The Death I Gave Him, draws on the figure of the ghost to offer a modern shadow of Hamlet. What do AI and Shakespeare have to say to each other? A lot more than we might assume. As Liu’s novel and Shakespeare’s Hamlet show, AI, or ghost in the machine, is a RenAIssance technology of regeneration, giving narratives a new life through the copresence and collective intelligence of humans and non-human entities. ::: https://www.folger.edu/blogs/folger-spotlight/collection-connections-specters-of-hamlet-and-ai-as-renaissance-technology/

South and who is of Chinese and African American descent. A Depression-era immigrant story of Wong Wan-Lee and his struggles against racism, nativism, and economic exploitation, And China Has Hands interrogates the myth of American mobility, the failures of capitalism, and the imperialist goals of Japan in China. Opening with a chance encounter that sees Pearl rescue Wong from the racist taunts of children, the novel focuses on their relationship as it leads to their actualization of the racial structures of capitalism toward the development of a revolutionary consciousness. Despite the novel's ambitious goals, literary scholars have generally dismissed And China Has Hands as a poorly written text that fails to conform to the literary conventions of the proletariat novel. Indeed, David Palumbo-Liu's analysis of the text is typical of the numerous scholars who consider the novel simplistic and stylistically flawed, remarking that it exhibits "the rather crude prose style of a social realist fable making all the gestures of political critique proper to the genre"(57). Alan Wald further criticizes Tsiang's aesthetics noting that Tsiang's "genre mixing, blurring of history and fiction, and his overall episodic construction may well be a consequence of his background in Chinese literary forms, as well as the difficulty of writing in a second language, or perhaps translating mentally as he wrote " (344). In a defense of the novel, Lynette Cintrón suggests, "the sporadic quality of Tsiang's prose reflects the chaotic rhythms of urban life while his cannibalizing of Western and Chinese traditions enacts a poetics of relation. In other words, Tsiang does not privilege one aesthetic tradition. This style suits his project of contesting capitalist and imperialist forces on a localized (U.S. / Japan) and global scale" (2). By articulating a transnational political critique of capitalism and imperialism through a hybrid aesthetic form, Cintrón suggests that Tsiang's novel posits a transnational and cross-cultural politics of identity that links revolutionary struggle with issues of race and gender inequality. While I would agree with Cintrón's interpretation of the text's transnational aesthetic and political commentary, I argue that, underneath its ostensibly transparent political message, there rests a Marxian commentary on the transformation of intimacy and sexuality under capitalism. This should come as no surprise given Tsiang's wellestablished Marxist leanings. Migrating to the United States in 1926 to flee China's Nationalist Party's conservative backlash to leftists, Tsiang established himself as a political agitator and, after finding California inhospitable to his politics, moved to New York where he studied at Columbia University (Cheung 58-59). Encouraged by his professors at Columbia, Tsiang composed editorials, wrote letters to political officials, brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

In Stories from the Edges of the Sea, Andrew Lam writes not from the center of trauma but from its quieter afterlives. These are not conventional Vietnamese refugee stories. They emerge from the margins, from the spaces between languages, memories, cities, and lovers. There is no grand narrative of escape or triumph here, only mood, drift, and moments that shimmer with unspoken feelings. What we find is not arrival or departure, but the tension of what lingers, swirls, and sometimes brings about quiet joy.

In the work of Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha impersonality is transformed from a desire to efface the subjectivity of the artist to a moving address to the audience.  Linking impersonality to considerations of reception describes this shift in sensibility in terms of what it achieves rather than what it eschews. One could say an ethic of impersonality is prevalent in late modern art; that is, artists in this period frequently expressed a concern with the audience and reception, as well as an awareness of the interpretative horizons within which their work might be read. In other words, such art is other-oriented, rather than conceived as being solely about the expression of the self.

In 1872, Mori Arinori, the newly-appointed Japanese ambassador to Washington, wrote to the linguist William Dwight Whitney concerning Mori's proposal to make English the national language of Japan, replacing Japanese. Whitney's response welcomed the idea of teaching English throughout Japan but explained why, from a linguist's point of view, Japanese neither could nor should be replaced. He was also unreceptive to Mori's suggestions for regularising English, levelling out strong past-tense verb forms and etymological spellings. Mori nevertheless had his proposal published in American newspapers, where it received widespread attention, including a mention in President Grant's Second Inaugural Address.

El objetivo de la presente tesis es demostrar que hay una serie de obras correspondientes a la ultima parte de la carrera literaria de Arthur Miller que muestran signos de haber sido influidas por una sensibilidad postmoderna. Mi relato comienza por definir el postmodernismo, para acto seguido comentar un conjunto de textos criticos que considero fundamentales con vistas a una discusion posterior de las obras objeto de estudio. En concreto se trata de cinco textos, escritos desde mediados de los 70 hasta mediados de los 2000, con los que ejemplifico la influencia del pensamiento y la literatura postmoderna en el Miller de ese periodo, pero tambien como muchas de sus ideas estaban en consonancia (desde un punto de vista politico, cultural y estetico) con gran parte del discurso dominante. Todo ello me permite concluir que Arthur Miller no fue durante esos anos, como suele afirmarse, una figura marginal sino alguien de una sensibilidad plenamente contemporanea. Para definir el postmod...

Contemporary socially engaged poets have been for over a decade challenging the notion that either experimental form is detrimental to a poem's political message or that a transparent agenda forecloses its chances of being considered high art. The work of Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez rebuts this dated conception of the ties between avantgarde art and social commitment. With his ongoing epic from UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY, Santos Perez recovers the land, culture, and language of his native Guam from the hands of the islands' historical colonizers, gathering the fragments he founds in the local oral history, court cases, songs, myths, and more. If Michael Dowdy is right when he claims that "if the political content of a poem is obscured or inaccessible, it will likely fail as a political figure of voice," there must be something in Santos Perez's poems that clarifies and makes that content accessible. Said thing is found in the numerous paratextual elements that feature in the series, most notably in the epigraphs. Furthermore, the fragments collected by Santos Perez can be regarded as the product of Guam's colonial history which the poet repurposes to create a new Chamorro identity.

The image of South Korea, as represented in the poetry of North Korean refugees, still waits for an attentive study. On the one hand, the necessity of such analysis springs from the need to examine North Korean refugee poets’ discourses, especially if we consider them as “foregoers of reunification” (Yi 2015, 81), if their literature “comes to help build a cultural foundation for preparing for unification” (Park [박덕규] 2015, 113) or “provides an opportunity to reflect on South Korean novels which seem overly-internalized” (Park [박덕규] 2018, 86). On the other hand, NK refugees’ perceptions of their host society in their verses can hopefully bring us closer to understanding of the advance of multiculturalism officially embraced by the Republic of Korea. This becomes quintessential if we take into account the fact that South Korean literary interpretations of 탈북 talbuk phenomenon slowly, but steadily grow in number. More specifically, in order to see what insights NK refugees’ poetry and its analysis provide for the questions of ‘diaspora within’ that the book attempts to highlight, this essay intends to address several research questions:
RQ1: How does the experience of cultural activity (and its socio-economic dimensions) of NK refugee poets reaffirm the existence of the dichotomy of “us and them” in the literary process of talbuk munhak and its epistemology? Does it challenge or urge SK literary circles to renew or negotiate their understanding or attitude towards that activity? This is linked to the next research question.
RQ2: How can “community” and “common good” be built that celebrate diversity, in terms of being accepting of NK refugees as a part of SK literary process and embracing their poetry? The answers to the aforementioned questions will hopefully give a generalized explanation about the place of the NK refugee poetry in SK literature and conditions of its creators to be able to understand better the images of the host country.
RQ3: How are the notions of “(new) homeland” and “diaspora” constructed, practiced and remembered by NK refugee poets and reflected in their verses?
In order to understand the perceptions of the host-country held by North Korean refugee poets, the study focuses mainly on the anthology published by The Institute for Peace and Unification Studies of the Seoul National University in 2018.2 However, where necessary, the paper also deals with less available writings authored by refugees, published in other instances and by different institutions (see Jang [장진성] 2008; Baek [백이무] 2013a; Baek [백이무] 2013b).3 In any case, the analysis of images of South Korea held by North Korean refugee poets is not an easy task, since these are scattered throughout multiple writings and more often than not they require a close look at the verses combined with careful analysis of multiple linguistic mechanisms (verbal markers, literary figures, etc.).

This article focuses on the historical trajectory and development of Anglophone literature in Bangladesh and Malaysia-two predominantly Muslim countries and previously British colonies categorised as "Outer Circle" countries in Braj Kachru's model of Englishspeaking communities. It investigates the introduction of the English language in these regions, its diffusion and the emergence of English literary practices among the urban elite, which initially excluded Bengali and Malay Muslims due to a lack of interest and opportunities, even though the tradition has subsequently flourished in both countries. The article also examines the challenges faced by this literary tradition during the colonial and postcolonial eras due to various decolonising efforts and conflicts related to language, religion, ethnicity and contesting nationalistic visions, which significantly impeded its development. Finally, the article probes the impact of "postnationalism" or globalisation on this literary tradition and its potential role in shaping its future in the two countries. 2 | Arrival of English and Inception of Anglophone Literature in Bangladesh and Malaysia English was introduced in Asia by Englishmen who first came for the spice trade, but that later developed into an imperial enterprise. However, the first Englishman to set foot on the continent was not a merchant but a Jesuit priest named Father This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

This book chapter from the Cambridge Companion series provides an introduction to nineteenth-century Asian American literature and the early history of Chinese immigrants in the United States. In the first section, I address the history of the Chinese in America, focusing on key economic issues and laws related to immigration. In the second section, I track the widely known figure of the “Heathen Chinee” through works of the 1870s and 1880s, highlighting how this literary trope directly mediated political and economic issues of the period, while also illustrating its shaping role in English-language writings by early Chinese immigrants (Wong Chin Foo and Yan Phou Lee). Some of this latter work, I conclude, anticipates the later emergence of Asian American politics and the contemporary racialization of Asians as America’s model minority.

This paper addresses the move away from sociological and cultural interpretations of texts at a time when the commodification of ethnicity is a dominant characteristic of late capitalism. I am interested in the way some scholars of Asian American literature are calling for a turn away from cultural approaches towards the aesthetics of the text. I would like to question the definition and role of the “aesthetic” in this critical move, a development that appears to be in contradiction with transnational constructions of American identity and the contemporary globalization of cultures, especially the global market in ethnic artistic and cultural commodities. Focussing upon the work of Gish Jen, I want to question this idea of the “aesthetic” and the ways in which art is constructed and consumed in the Chinese American literary context.

The enforced sexual servitude of Korean women and girls, so-called "comfort women," under the Japanese military occupation of World War Two has, since the early 1990s, become a significant issue in global sexual politics. In lectures and written ...

would like to thank Ryunosuke Kimura for his generosity in graciously sharing the playtext and recorded video of the production. I also wish to express my deepest appreciation to Tsunao Yamai for his insightful post-production lectures on Noh theatre at Engeki-no-gakko, a theatre school also run by Kimura. Without their kindness and support, it would not have been possible for me to write this review.

Dans le procès relatif à de possibles crimes de guerre commis par les États-Unis au Vietnam, les juges français ont pour le moment refusé ne serait-ce que d’entendre l’affaire, en considérant probablement au fond qu’elle n’a pas grand-chose à voir avec la France.
Or cette affaire a tout à voir avec la France. La France a refusé hier de respecter le droit des Vietnamiens à disposer d’eux-mêmes et a créé la guerre américano-vietnamienne et ses ravages. Elle perpétue aujourd’hui cette histoire d’oppression en refusant de juger l’Agent orange selon le droit. Cette oppression est passée par les administrateurs coloniaux, force essentielle de refus de la décolonisation, et par le monde politique et administratif français. Elle risque aujourd’hui de passer par sa justice et certains penseront non sans fondement que les juges du fond se sont justement comportés en administrateurs plutôt qu’en hommes de droit et de justice dans cette affaire, ce qui met en cause l'état de droit.
Il faut espérer, désormais, que les juges de cassation répareront cette situation déshonorable pour la France. La France a jadis été indifférente au sort des victimes de ses actions, il faudrait qu’elle ne le soit pas de nos jours.

I examine how Malaka Gharib's I Was Their American Dream and It Won't Always Be Like This frame, embody, and reimagine girlhood through a multicultural transnational lens. Born in California, Gharib grew up with Filipino and Egyptian heritage. Taking advantage of the formal properties of comics, her work situates her memories and experiences at the intersection of ethnicity, gender, and transnational encounters. I interrogate how these books visualize the connection between girlhood and mixed heritage through the artist-narrator's interactions with and observation of her Filipino mother and relatives in the United States and her father, stepmother, half-siblings, and neighbors in Egypt. I also examine how the multimodality of comics draws on tropes of girlhood to enable representation through the depiction and layering of different selves.

According to Paul Hoover in the introduction to Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, postmodernism refers to "the historical period following World War II…. as well as a worldview that sets itself apart from mainstream culture" (xxv). While this is only one of many possible definitions of postmodernism, it does indicate that looking to Classical Japanese literature for forms conducive to American postmodernity may be somewhat counterintuitive. However, postmodernists have found useful tools in stranger places, and a moment's glance at one Classical Japanese genre, the zuihitsu, will begin, I believe, to reveal its potential as a postmodern form. Employing Kimiko Hahn's The Narrow Road to the Interior as the primary example, with some comparison to an established American postmodern text, Carole Maso's AVA, I intend to demonstrate that potential. Before I can proceed further, however, I must provide a little background on both postmodern literature and the zuihitsu genre. Only then can I begin to discuss why the latter may be so useful to the former. For Fredric Jameson, postmodernism represents a specific break from Romanticism and Modernism. As he argues in "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," one of the most important features of postmodernism is the transgression or "effacement" of key boundaries or separations, "most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture" (655). Postmodernism is also characterized by, among other things, "aesthetic populism," "the deconstruction of expression," the "fragmentation of the subject," and the imitation of dead styles and languages through the use of pastiche (Jameson, "Cultural Logic" 53-92). Furthermore, Paul Hoover, in Postmodern American Poetry, views postmodernism as "an ongoing process of resistance to mainstream ideology" (xxvi). Hoover elaborates, explaining that postmodernism includes a process of doubling-back, overlapping, and contradicting to erase or deconstruct conclusions, relies on a "panoptic" view point, and "opposes the centrist values of unity, significance, [and] linearity…" (xxvii). Finally, Ihab Hassan's essay "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism" offers a list of some of postmodernism's most recognizable aspects. According to Hassan, postmodernism incorporates such things as play, silence, process and performance, absence, dispersal, parataxis, metonomy, idiolect, desire, difference, indeterminacy, and immanence. The zuihitsu is a classical genre of Japanese literature that emerged sometime in the Heian Period (794-1185 AD), and the first known example is Makura Soshi, or The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon. The word zuihitsu, made up of the kanji for 'to follow' and 'brush,' is usually loosely translated as "random jottings," or more literally and evocatively as "following [the impulses of] the brush" (Keene 1). The most basic definition of zuihitsu is: a collection of "brief essays on random topics" in which the "observations and reflections of the writer are presented with stylistic grace" (Keene 1, 9). A zuihitsu may consist of a series of loosely connected essays and anecdotes, as well as disconnected sentences, fragments, ideas, word pictures, poems, lists,

According to Paul Hoover in the introduction to Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, postmodernism refers to "the historical period following World War II…. as well as a worldview that sets itself apart from mainstream culture" (xxv). While this is only one of many possible definitions of postmodernism, it does indicate that looking to Classical Japanese literature for forms conducive to American postmodernity may be somewhat counterintuitive. However, postmodernists have found useful tools in stranger places, and a moment's glance at one Classical Japanese genre, the zuihitsu, will begin, I believe, to reveal its potential as a postmodern form. Employing Kimiko Hahn's The Narrow Road to the Interior as the primary example, with some comparison to an established American postmodern text, Carole Maso's AVA, I intend to demonstrate that potential. Before I can proceed further, however, I must provide a little background on both postmodern literature and the zuihitsu genre. Only then can I begin to discuss why the latter may be so useful to the former. For Fredric Jameson, postmodernism represents a specific break from Romanticism and Modernism. As he argues in "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," one of the most important features of postmodernism is the transgression or "effacement" of key boundaries or separations, "most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture" (655). Postmodernism is also characterized by, among other things, "aesthetic populism," "the deconstruction of expression," the "fragmentation of the subject," and the imitation of dead styles and languages through the use of pastiche (Jameson, "Cultural Logic" 53-92). Furthermore, Paul Hoover, in Postmodern American Poetry, views postmodernism as "an ongoing process of resistance to mainstream ideology" (xxvi). Hoover elaborates, explaining that postmodernism includes a process of doubling-back, overlapping, and contradicting to erase or deconstruct conclusions, relies on a "panoptic" view point, and "opposes the centrist values of unity, significance, [and] linearity…" (xxvii). Finally, Ihab Hassan's essay "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism" offers a list of some of postmodernism's most recognizable aspects. According to Hassan, postmodernism incorporates such things as play, silence, process and performance, absence, dispersal, parataxis, metonomy, idiolect, desire, difference, indeterminacy, and immanence. The zuihitsu is a classical genre of Japanese literature that emerged sometime in the Heian Period (794-1185 AD), and the first known example is Makura Soshi, or The Pillow Book, by Sei Shonagon. The word zuihitsu, made up of the kanji for 'to follow' and 'brush,' is usually loosely translated as "random jottings," or more literally and evocatively as "following [the impulses of] the brush" (Keene 1). The most basic definition of zuihitsu is: a collection of "brief essays on random topics" in which the "observations and reflections of the writer are presented with stylistic grace" (Keene 1, 9). A zuihitsu may consist of a series of loosely connected essays and anecdotes, as well as disconnected sentences, fragments, ideas, word pictures, poems, lists,