The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives

The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives

by Eleanor Ty
The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives

The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives

by Eleanor Ty

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Overview

Examining nine Asian Canadian and Asian American narratives, Eleanor Ty explores how authors empower themselves, represent differences, and re-script their identities as 'visible minorities' within the ideological, imaginative, and discursive space given to them by dominant culture. In various ways, Asian North Americans negotiate daily with 'birthmarks,' their shared physical features marking them legally, socially, and culturally as visible outsiders, and paradoxically, as invisible to mainstream history and culture.

Ty argues that writers such as Denise Chong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Wayson Choy recast the marks of their bodies and challenge common perceptions of difference based on the sights, smells, dress, and other characteristics of their hyphenated lives. Others, like filmmaker Mina Shum and writers Bienvenido Santos and Hiromi Goto, challenge the means by which Asian North American subjects are represented and constructed in the media and in everyday language. Through close readings grounded in the socio-historical context of each work, Ty studies the techniques of various authors and filmmakers in their meeting of the gaze of dominant culture and their response to the assumptions and meanings commonly associated with Orientalized, visible bodies.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781442638754
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Publication date: 05/20/2004
Series: Heritage
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 656 KB

About the Author

Eleanor Ty is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii
Prefaceix
Introduction3
Part IVisuality, Representation, and the Gaze
1Writing Historiographic Autoethnography: Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children33
2A Filipino Prufrock in an Alien Land: Bienvenido Santos's The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor54
3Rescripting Hollywood: Performativity and Ethnic Identity in Mina Shum's Double Happiness69
Part IITransformations Through the Sensual
4To Make Sense of Differences: Communities, Texts, and Bodies in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces85
5'Some Memories Live Only on Your Tongue': Recalling Tastes, Reclaiming Desire in Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife101
6'Each Story Brief and Sad and Marvellous': Multiple Voices in Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony116
Part IIIInvisible Minorities in Asian America
7'Never Again Be the Yvonne of Yesterday': Personal and Collective Loss in Cecilia Brainard's When the Rainbow Goddess Wept137
8'Thrumming Songs of Ecstasy': Female Voices in Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms152
9'On the Fence That Was Never Finished': Borderline Filipino Existence in Bino Realuyo's The Umbrella Country169
Afterword185
Notes189
Works Cited203
Index219

What People are Saying About This

Patricia P. Chu

'Ty's scholarship is not only solid and up-to-date but impressive in its range and suppleness. Her book conveys awareness, not only of the major primary texts and authors in Asian North American literature, but also the most recent publications in Asian American theory. To this she adds eclectic references to a wide range of theory, including psychoanalytic, genre, postcolonial, and postmodernist, and concise, well-focused historical backgrounds. Her book combines a sense of familiarity with the various theoretical frameworks with astute, beautifully nuanced readings of the literary and cinematic texts ... A smart and elegant book that fills some significant gaps in the existing scholarship.'

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