Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> American - Asian American & Pacific Islander

For South Asians, food regularly plays a role in how issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and national identity are imagined as well as how notions of belonging are affirmed or resisted.a"Culinary Fictions"aprovides food for thought as it considers the metaphors literature, film, and TV shows use to describe Indians abroad. When an immigrant mother in Jhumpa LahiriOCOsa"The Namesake"acombines Rice Krispies, Planters peanuts, onions, salt, lemon juice, and green chili peppers to create a dish similar to one found on Calcutta sidewalks, it evokes not only the characterOCOs...

A tour-de-force in Asian American writing, Amy Tan has created works that are essential to high school and undergraduate literature classes and are often book club selections. "Reading Amy Tan" is a handy resource that offers both groups plot summaries of five of Tan's novels, as well as character and thematic analysis. The handbook also provides an overview of Tan's life and discusses how she emerged onto the scene as a novelist.

Tan's typical themes, including Asian American issues and mother-daughter relationships, are examined in relation to today's current events and pop culture....

This book offers an incisive and ambitious critique of Asian Diaspora culture, looking specifically at literature and visual popular culture. Sheng-mei Ma's engaging text discusses issues of self and its relationship with Asian Diaspora culture in the global twenty-first century.

Using examples from Asia, Asian America, and Asian Diaspora from the West, the book weaves a narrative that challenges the twenty-first century triumphal discourse of Asia and argues that given the long shadow cast across modern film and literature, this upward mobility is inescapably escapist, a...

Mulan, the warrior maiden who performed heroic deeds in battle while dressed as a male soldier, has had many incarnations from her first appearance as a heroine in an ancient Chinese folk ballad. MulanOCOs story was retold for centuries, extolling the filial virtue of the young woman who placed her father's honor and well-being above her own. With the publication of Maxine Hong KingstonOCOsa"The Woman Warrior"ain the late 1970s, Mulan first became familiar to American audiences who were fascinated with the extraordinary Asian American character. MulanOCOs story was recast yet again in the...

In the first book-length study of Vietnamese American literature, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud probes the complexities of Vietnamese American identity and politics. She provides an analytical introduction to the literature, showing how generational differences play out in genre and text. In addition, she asks, can the term Vietnamese American be disassociated from representations of the war without erasing its legacy?

Pelaud delineates the historical, social, and cultural terrains of the writing as well as the critical receptions and responses to them. She moves beyond the common focus on the...

In fiction and nonfiction, Asian Americans and Jewish Americans grapple with their "model minority" status and the contested nature of citizenship

Providing a useful analysis of and framework for understanding immigration and assimilation narratives, anupama jain's" How to Be South Asian in America" considers the myth of the American Dream in fiction (Meena Alexander's "Manhattan Music"), film ("American Desi, American Chai"), and personal testimonies. By interrogating familiar American stories in the context of more supposedly exotic narratives, jain illuminates complexities of belonging that also reveal South Asians' anxieties about belonging, (trans)nationalism, and processes of cultural interpenetration.
jain argues that...

Yoonmee Chang examines the class structure of Chinatowns, Koreatowns, Little Tokyos, and Little Indias, arguing that ghettoization in these spaces is...

Twentieth-century America reduced Vietnam to "'Nam" the surreal site of a military nightmare. The early twenty-first century has seen the revision of this image to recognize the people and culture of Vietnam itself. Vietnamese Americans, both immigrants and the American children of immigrants, have participated in changing this perception, consistently presenting their side of the story in memoirs published since the 1960s. My Viet is the first anthology to provide a comprehensive overview of these memoirs and the historical picture they offer and to include Vietnamese writing that goes...