Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives

by Eleanor Ty

Overview

Unfastened examines literary works and films by Asian Americans and Asian Canadians that respond critically to globality—the condition in which traditional national, cultural, geographical, and economic boundaries have been—supposedly—surmounted.
 
In this wide-ranging exploration, Eleanor Ty reveals how novelists such as Brian Ascalon Roley, Han Ong, Lydia Kwa, and Nora Okja Keller interrogate the theoretical freedom that globalization promises in their depiction of the underworld of crime and prostitution. She looks at the social critiques created by playwrights Betty Quan and Sunil Kuruvilla, who use figures of disability to accentuate the effects of marginality. Investigating works based on fantasy, Ty highlights the ways feminist writers Larissa Lai, Chitra Divakaruni, Hiromi Goto, and Ruth Ozeki employ myth, science fiction, and magic realism to provide alternatives to global capitalism. She notes that others, such as filmmaker Deepa Mehta and performers/dramatists Nadine Villasin and Nina Aquino, play with the multiple identities afforded to them by transcultural connections.
 
Ultimately, Ty sees in these diverse narratives unfastened mobile subjects, heroes, and travelers who use everyday tactics to challenge inequitable circumstances in their lives brought about by globalization.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816665082
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	03/23/2010
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Eleanor Ty is professor of English and film studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She has published widely on Asian North American literature and film and on eighteenth-century British literature.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Reading Globality ix

I Doing Global Dirty Work

1 The 1.5 Generation: Filipino Youth, Transmigrancy, and Masculinity 3

2 Recuperating Wretched Lives: Asian Sex Workers and the Underside of Nation Building 20

II Performing and Negotiating Transcultural Identities

3 "All of Us are the Same": Negotiating Loss, Witnessing Disability 43

4 Feminist Subversions: Comedy and the Carnivalesque 63

III Future Perfect: Feminist Resistance to Global Homogeneity

5 Shape-shifters and Disciplined Bodies: Feminist Tactics, Science Fiction, and Fantasy 89

6 Scripting Fertility: Desire and Regeneration in Japanese North American Literature 108

Coda: Rethinking the Hyphen 129

Notes 143

Works Cited 151

Filmography 167

Index 169