The interethnic imagination : roots and passages in contemporary Asian American fiction

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Title:

Author:

Rody, Caroline, 1960-

ISBN:

9780195377361

Personal Author:

Rody, Caroline, 1960-

Publication Information:

New York : Oxford University Press, 2009.

Physical Description:

xx, 196 p.

Series:

Imagining the Americas

Series Title:

Imagining the Americas

General Note:

Formerly CIP.

Contents:

Ch. 1. The interethnic paradigm and the case of Asian American fiction -- Interchapter. Asian/African : black presences in Asian American fiction -- Ch. 2. "With darkness yet" : Chang-rae Lee's Native speaker, blackness, and the interethnic imagination -- Ch. 3. Letters from Camp Gugelstein : interethnicity and Jewishness in Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land -- Interchapter. Cross-ethnic Jewishness in Asian American and other contemporary fiction -- Ch. 4. Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange and the transnational, interethnic imagination -- Epilogue. Mixed races, mixed children, mixed outcomes.

Subject Term:

American fiction -- Asian American authors -- History and criticism.

Asian Americans in literature.

Ethnic relations in literature.

Racially mixed people in literature.

Cultural fusion in literature.

Copies:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:IIEMSA	1:GEN-BOOK	33168025523479	813.609895 R697.I 2009	1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

In the wake of all that is changing in local and global cultures - in patterns of migration, settlement, labor, and communications - a radical interaction has taken place that, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, has shifted our understanding of ethnicity away from 'ethnic in itself' to 'ethnic amidst a hybrid collective'. In light of this, Caroline Rody proposes a new paradigm for understanding the changing terrain of contemporary fiction. She claims that what we have long read as ethnic literature is in the process of becoming 'interethnic'. Examining an extensive range of Asian American fictions, The Interethnic Imagination offers sustained readings of three especially compelling examples: Chang-rae Lee's ambivalent evocations of blackness, whiteness, Koreanness, and the multicultural crowd in Native Speaker; Gish Jen's comic engagement with Jewishness in Mona in the Promised Land; and the transnational imagination of Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange. Two shorter "interchapters" and an epilogue extend the thematics of creative "in-betweenness" across the book's structure, elaborating crossover topics including Asian American fiction's complex engagement with African American culture; the cross-ethnic adoption of Jewishness by Asian American writers; and the history of mixed-race Asian American fictional characters.