Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short-story Cycles (review)

Abstract

Davis's Transcultural Reinventions concentrates on genre, which makes her study a unique and necessary contribution to Asian American and Asian Canadian studies. While much scholarship overlooks the importance of how form, along with historical and social contexts, functions to illuminate identity and ethnic politics, Davis contends that studying literary strategies—both the appropriation and the subversion of traditional forms—that have been employed by Asian American and Asian Canadian authors can reveal insights into racial and gendered representations and into nationhood. In fact, Davis finds that the recent interpretation of Asian American and Asian Canadian works of literature as either transparent ethnographic studies, or as heavily theorized through Euro-American theoretical models, can become strategies of colonization that re-relegate the literature to places of inferiority. "Coherent investigations," Davis contends, must explore not only "what the texts mean, but how they mean" (3).