Asian American Authors Research Articles

Gender Issues in Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller

Through an exploration of the comfort women system, this article analyzes how the female gender has been oppressed in history. It follows the story of Akiko, the main character of Comfort Woman (1998) by Asian American author Nora Okja Keller. Keller is one of the first authors to write about comfort women, gaining publicity for this issue. This article provides an examination of terms such as sex, gender, and gender issues. Certain concepts influencing American and Asian cultures and their stance towards gender are also analyzed, after which focus is placed on the portrayal of gender roles as illustrated in the novel. The article briefly mentions the history of the relationship between the United States and Korea. The characteristics of the comfort women system are described as well as the causes leading to its establishment such as patriarchy, Confucian traditions, and the exploitability of lower-class society. Additionally, the article highlights how the comfort women issue helped define feminist theory in the US and identifies the transnational nature of the issues involved.

The representation of Asian-Americans amid COVID-19: A case study of The Washington Post and CNN

This paper focuses on the representation of the Asian-American community during the COVID-19 pandemic in the opinion articles of the US media about the growing expressions of violence against the community. These articles were posted in The Washington Post and CNN by an Asian-American journalist and an American journalist, respectively. Quantitatively, this study focuses on the proper nouns “Asian(s)” and “American(s)”. Qualitatively, it focuses on identifying patterns and interpreting the meanings underlying the discourse structures employed by each author. For these purposes, corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA) were employed. Results show that the Asian-American author uses the proper nouns and rhetorical figures more than their American counterpart, who mostly uses quoting. This, since the former speaks from the community and the latter speaks to the community. It is suggested that the opinion articles discourse should be approached critically since they may influence the readers’ representations around the topic.

Afro-Asian Antagonism and the Long Korean War

American racial politics during the long Korean War formed what this essay terms Afro-Asian antagonism, a racial hate between African Americans and Asians (and Asian Americans). When the Truman administration issued Executive Order 9981 and proclaimed its commitment to military racial integration in 1948, two years before the outbreak of the Korean War, it seemed to signal a significant step of racial progress. Black servicemen who enlisted in the “liberalized” military, however, were strategically deployed to represent American national violence, especially to the eyes of Asians who were internalizing antiblack racism imported from the United States through the military apparatus. In the face of decolonization and an upsurge in civil rights movements, this article argues, the executive order molded Black Korean War veterans into an instrument to abort Afro-Asian connections while promoting racial liberalism to a global audience. The Korean War inaugurated the American Cold War racial formation that endures into the twenty-first century. Contrasting two Korean War novels written by Asian American and African American authors—Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl (2002) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012)—this article traces how Afro-Asian orphans and a Black veteran internalize and challenge the Afro-Asian antagonisms of the long Korean War.

Semiperipherality and the Taiwanese American Novel

Abstract: While Asian American authors have certainly produced narratives of return to their or their predecessors' countries of origin, these narratives have, until recently, predominantly appeared in memoir and autobiography. Since the turn of the millennium there's been a significant uptick in the fictional portrayal of return. In stark contrast to the spiritual and filial returns in memoir, these fictional portrayals tend not to sentimentalize return. The protagonists who return more often follow economic or professional trajectories. In novels like Tao Lin's Taipei (2013), Ling Ma's Severance (2018), Han Ong's The Disinherited (2004), Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Brian Ascalon Roley's American Son (2001), and Lucy Tan's What We Were Promised (2018), return to Asia intensifies rather than vitiates material structures of alienation. What we find is that they tend to undermine an emerging Twenty-first century racial form that welds the Asian to neoliberal flexibility, even if they often forego critique. This article will describe contemporary Asian/American return fictions in contrast to earlier manifestations of the genre and explore their problematic relationship to categories like Asian American and Anglophone Asian fiction.

“Into the Widest Imagination”

“Into the Widest Imagination”

The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s by Matthew M. Lambert

<i>The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s</i> by Matthew M. Lambert

MRAsians: A Convergence between Asian American Hypermasculine Ethnonationalism and the Manosphere

As Asian Americans have increasingly adopted digital spaces to drive identity politics discourse, this trend has also fueled the explosive growth of an online, anti-feminist Asian American men's rights subculture (colloquially, "MRAsians"). This essay explores the roots of the MRAsian movement, and specifically examines how MRAsians draw inspiration from both Asian American author Frank Chin as well as mainstream men's movement ideologies to promote an increasingly extreme Asian American anti-feminism that views the targeted harassment of Asian American women as a core unifying principle. Lastly, this essay considers the long-lasting impact of the MRAsian movement on its victims, adherents, and on the larger Asian American politic.

Science Fictionality and Post-65 Asian American Literature

AbstractSince 1965, Asian American authors have been key mediators of science fictionality, defined as a postwar fantasy that associates endless, industrial-led economic expansion with racialized groups of upwardly mobile professionals. This status is a consequence of the occupational concentration of Asian immigrants into professional-managerial careers, especially in scientific and technical fields: a phenomenon that can be traced back to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (1976) along with the debut works of recent Chinese American women writers, including Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), this article describes a dialectic of science fictionality and post-65 Asian American literature in which the latter develops autopoetic tendencies that register occupational concentration in genre, theme, characterization, and trope. This reorientation of post-65 Asian American literary history to the material conditions of science fictionality, rather than ethnic self-expression, has implications not only for understanding that history but also for generalized periodizations of contemporary US literature like the “genre turn,” which risk eliding the specificity of minority literary histories.

Scenes: Four Way Books: An interview with Martha Rhodes

ScenesFour Way Books: An interview with Martha Rhodes Martha Rhodes Four Way Books www.fourwaybooks.com Could you briefly describe your press’s history? Four Way Books is in its twenty-eighth year of publishing poetry and short fiction collections by emerging and established writers. We operate out of lower Manhattan with a small, efficient staff that works together in close coordination, all positions filled by long term, highly committed personnel. We serve readers and writers — mostly, but not exclusively adults, from all walks of life, all corners of the country. Our titles have been honored with awards such as the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, The Lenore Marshall, The Norma Farber First Book Award, The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, The Great Lakes New Writers Award for Poetry, to mention just a few awards over the year. Our titles have also been on the NYT top 10 list for poetry. Stellar reviews in the NYT, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and many literary reviews have both been encouraging and thrilling for staff and author and have succeeded in giving our titles more reach. Because we matter to readers, FWB has been profiled by the Best American Poetry, the NYT, and the LA Review of Books and Writers for Change (excerpted here) “New York has seen plenty of ruin over the last two decades, from the ash of 9/11 [FWB office is just blocks from Ground Zero] to the wreckage of Hurricane Sandy. But for over 20 years, FWB has also been building something of its own, a city within a city, something cognizant of — but impervious to — that ruin… [A] thriving small press, publishing some of the most interesting, aesthetically diverse poetry and fiction in the country.” “A sanctuary.” Click for larger view View full resolution How would you characterize the work you publish? Narrative, lyric, quiet, domestic, political, linear, jagged, spare, expansive — we don’t fit into any niche; we aren’t groupies of any trends. We publish what makes us think, breaks our hearts, makes us laugh — engages us, worries us, concerns us, speaks to us. Well-crafted writing by writers who expertly manage their content. We publish work by yetto-be known and popular, buzzy, award-winning authors (as well as under-the radar tours de force) whose work is massively resonant in contemporary American life. Some of our authors dig where they stand, others throw the shovel farther away. All are deeply engaged with the world, the complexities that characterize their inner and exterior landscapes depicted through expert management of craft through the decisions they make in the use of language, syntax, form, structure, and so forth. How the author manages content is the key factor for us when we think about accepting a book and then as we go on to make editing suggestions to a given author. We are also attuned — actually I would say that we are especially attuned — to hearing the speaker’s mind in action, to being able to hear/experience the gears cranking as the speaker discovers thoughts and feelings, the moment(s) of discovery and surprise activate our own discoveries and senses of surprise as we read and so we don’t want to feel that the content was pre-digested before it even got to the page. We want to feel its aliveness and be thrilled by that, no matter how somber or devastating those moments on the pages might be. Who is your audience, and in what ways are you trying to reach them? We hope to be a great leg up to our authors, emerging and established, connecting them with longtime literary folks and those who are newly discovering contemporary writers. We seek niche readers by subject matter (health communities for a doctor poet, etc), expanding the lit audience! We have strong cohorts of African American and Asian American, Latinx, and queer authors. We publish authors in their 20s–80s and climbing. Writers and readers alike hail from diverse, often underserved demographics. We offer readers the best new American writing across genres, across aesthetic divides, with many ways to learn of and appreciate the work. We hope to find reading and presenting opportunities for...

(Non)Places of Bangalore: Where the East Meets the West in Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India

This essay constitutes an attempt at reading Bharati Mukherjee’s 2011 novel, Miss New India, through the prism of spatial locations depicted in it. Unlike many of the texts in the late South Asian American author’s oeuvre, which depict migration from the East to the West, Miss New India is located exclusively within South Asia. This notwithstanding, the novel focuses on the impact the West used to and continues to exert on the East. I would like to argue that through her depictions of places and non-places of Bangalore-the novel’s primary location-Mukherjee points to the spatial interconnectedness of the East and the West as well as to the temporal interconnectedness of the colonial past and postcolonial, late-capitalist present.

Letters for Black Lives: Co-ethnic Mobilization and Support for the Black Lives Matter Movement

Previous research demonstrates that individuals are more open to persuasion from people who share their race. However, it is not known whether this relationship holds for Asian Americans. We address this shortcoming by exploring how the race of an author influences support for, and perceptions of, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Drawing from literature on opinion formation and social identity theory, we expect that whites will be most persuaded by whites, while Asian Americans will not be particularly persuaded by co-ethnic messengers due to relatively low levels of group identity. To test our hypotheses, we use two online surveys that oversample Asian American respondents who are randomly assigned letters in support of BLM written by either an Asian American author or a white author. Similar to previous research, we find that whites are more likely to respond to appeals from co-racial individuals. However, we find that Asian Americans respond positively to co-ethnic and white messengers. Further analysis reveals that Asian Americans’ lower levels of in-group preferences compared with whites explains why they do not respond to co-racial individuals similarly to other groups.

Youth Voices and Diasporic Public Spheres: An Examination of Tanuja Desai Hidier's Born Confused

Using Nancy Fraser's analyses of transnational public spheres, this essay argues that South Asian Americans engage multiple public spheres that are transnational and polycentric. Literary works by South Asian American authors demonstrate how such diasporic public spheres work to facilitate social change. Despite numerous articles and books that discuss South Asian American literature, there are very few critical works that explore young adult fiction for and by South Asians. This essay explores how Tanuja Desai Hidier's novel Born Confused (2002) participates in the public sphere. The essay argues that while the novel succeeds in identifying the concerns of immigrant youth, the plot trajectory focuses the action mostly on changes at the familial level, thus perhaps pointing to the limited impact of youth power within the public sphere. By locating change and debate mostly within familial structures, the novel also demonstrates the power differences between different public spheres and suggests that youth voices are still nascent in public debate

Creative Pluralism in Indian and Romanian Accounts of Transnational Migration

Abstract The paper offers a comparative perspective on transmigrant cultural identities as illustrated in the works of two contemporary South Asian American and Romanian American authors, Jhumpa Lahiri and Aura Imbăruș. The comparison involves Gogol, a South Asian American character, and Aura, the author of the memoir Out of the Transylvania Night. Although Gogol is a fictional character and Aura is an actual transmigrant, their comparative assessment relies on the assumption that both narratives are inspired by the authors’ background of relocation. Despite their different cultural origins, both authors share thematic aspects related to the dynamics of cultural identity in the context of migration. This paper aims to provide a starting point for an enlarged framework of comparative analysis, in order to foreground intersections between different experiences of cultural negotiation in the context of displacement. Born and raised in America, Gogol is challenged by his cultural multiplicity and strives to suppress elements of his Indian identity. After years of rebelling against his parents’ norms, Gogol shifts to the Bengali model, when his father dies. Once he accepts the relevance of his cultural roots, Gogol is able to plunge into a dimension situated beyond his Bengali and American selves. His transcendent strategy is illustrated by his decision to plunge into a third space of redefinition, suggested by the Russian literature which is appreciated by Gogol’s father. Aura Imbăruș offers the example of a first generation Romanian transmigrant who undergoes voluntary relocation to the United States. Fascinated by the American world, Aura is eager to take over norms of material success and consumerism, overlooking the relevance of her cultural roots. When she undergoes a personal family crisis, Aura eventually reassesses the value of her Romanian background, aiming to reconcile her source culture with her Americanised self. In a manner similar to Gogol’s, Aura manages to integrate American norms of success, while forging enduring bonds with the Romanian American community in California.

Guerrilla Conversions in Jessica Hagedorn and José Rizal: The Queer Future of National Romance

This article calls for a critical reevaluation of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters that situates Hagedorn within the historical specificity of the Philippines during multiple occupations. Though she is typically read as an Asian American author, reading Hagedorn back into the Philippines reveals new literary traditions that inform her work. Specifically, reading Hagedorn alongside the late nineteenth-century Filipino patriot and national hero José Rizal reveals a previously unidentified genre, the guerrilla conversion narrative.

Forging Transnational Identities: A Postethnic Diasporic Re-imaging of “Home” in Jhumpa Lahiri’s &lt;i&gt;The Namesake&lt;i/&gt;

Benedict Anderson's definition of nation as “an imagined political community” (6) is important in the context of the portrayal of home by diasporic writers. “Home,” when re-calling or re-imaging the quest for belonging from the point of view of the diaspora, is often portrayed as an elusive metaphoric vision that is in resonance with the struggle against the attempt to pin the term down to physical dimensions.  This paper explores the concept of “home” in terms of its changing connotations in the diasporic writing of Asian American author Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri's 2003 novel, The Namesake, portrays the diasporic conflict between an essentialist Indian identity and assimilating into America's multicultural ethos. This conflict is more pronounced in the case of the female characters, portrayed through attempts at juxtaposing traditional expectations and complete assimilation. Home becomes a “presence in absence” for the female characters in Lahiri's novel, challenging the idea of an identity based on the nation as a fixed, geographical entity, and the culinary becomes the site for cultural negotiation. This paper seeks to delineate how conflicting identities make Vijay Mishra's concept of the diasporic “impossible mourning” (9) a ground to forge a new identity based on the concept of a postethnic transnational diasporic space.

Self-Expression and World-Expression: Critical Multicultural Literacy in Maxine Hong Kingston and Sandra Cisneros

Self-Expression and World-Expression:Critical Multicultural Literacy in Maxine Hong Kingston and Sandra Cisneros Fatima Mujcinovic (bio) Speaking the word is not a true act if it is not at the same time associated with the right of self-expression and world-expression, of creating and recreating, of deciding and choosing and ultimately participating in society's historical processes. —Paulo Freire Since slave narratives and early immigrant autobiographies, literacy has been featured in United States literature as a major issue in minorities' struggle for power and equality. Some minority writers, such as Native Americans Zitkala-Sa and Simon Ortiz, have depicted the acquisition of dominant literacy as a forcefully imposed method of cultural assimilation. At the same time, Sa and Ortiz have acknowledged the fact that English proficiency, both oral and written, allows Native Americans to communicate their struggles for physical and cultural survival to wider audiences. For many Native American writers who publish in English, the use of dominant language to express indigenous content is an act of political activism and cultural preservation.1 Other minority authors, most notably Frederick Douglass and Richard Wright, have rendered English literacy as an effective instrument for self-empowerment and social integration. Exposing the systemic practices of denying or segregating education on the basis of race, their autobiographies have emphasized the importance of equal access to formal education in minority Americans' struggles for emancipation. As young men, both Douglass and Wright quickly comprehended the link between knowledge and power and pursued literacy/education as a means of reclaiming control over their lives.2 Revealing the meaning of literacy policies as deeply embedded in specific social arrangements and ideologies, these approaches counter the dominant view of literacy as a neutral, autonomous practice. In more recent literary works, US minority authors have gone further to question Western literacy/education as a monolithic ideological concept, exposing its failure to recognize the existence and validity of non-Western forms of knowledge. In their contemporary approaches to the meaning and practice of education in minority contexts, literacy is often presented in relation to cultural difference, hybrid identities, and political agency. For instance, contemporary US Latino/a writers have stressed the [End Page 98] importance of bilingualism in their portrayals of bicultural experiences, linking the concept of bilingual literacy to Latinos' cultural and political rights in the United States. Integration of Spanish and/or Spanglish in their writing in English serves not only to develop distinctly Latino settings and themes but also to interrogate homogenous definitions of modern American culture. Reflecting their strong commitment to cultural diversity and equality, the performance of multicultural literacy allows US minority writers to present non-dominant cultural practices, values, and symbols as meaningful parts of national culture. These interventions also communicate demands for multicultural models of knowledge: as they themselves participate in the creation of such models, minority writers strive to ensure that members of their communities in general are allowed to transform and create literacies. Because traditional definitions of literacy cannot fully convey marginal experiences, new conceptions are being produced and embraced as necessary modes of self-expression. The noted Asian American author Maxine Hong Kingston affirms this idea when commenting on her unique style of writing: "I am trying to write an American language that has Chinese accents; I write the American language the way I speak it. So in a way, I [am] creating something new, but at the same time, it's still the American language, pushed further" (qtd. in Rabinowitz 182). Sandra Cisneros, a prominent Mexican American writer, points out a similar linguistic polyphony in her work: "What I am especially aware of lately is how the Spanish syntax and word choice occurs in my work even though I write in English" ("Ghosts and Voices" 72). To tell the story of their communities, minority authors like Kingston and Cisneros recognize that inserting marks of otherness into the English language enables them to present the uniqueness of their ethnic traditions while also claiming their place in America's culture and language. This conscious process of adapting dominant literacy to create new literary models reflects a democratic understanding of culture, elucidating the need for inclusive and diverse literacy practices...

Boys Will Be Boys? Subverting Traditional Power Structures in Asian-American Prose

Leaving one’s home country behind and starting a new life on a different continent may also involve being confronted with behaviors and values completely different from the ones that were deemed the only ones back home. This experience is described by the protagonist of the Asian-American author Amy Tan’s story “The Red Candle”, recalling her arrival in California from a small village in China. In her attempt to bridge the gap between the conflicting worlds of “Old East and New West”, the protagonist uses concepts and metaphors that might be transferred and prove valuable in more than one cultural context. In the hierarchy of the culture which is described, a position of power is most of all connected to gender, age, health and wealth. The analysis will show the subtle ways in which these criteria are interconnected and in which their importance and meaning are both subject to negotiation and to possible change over time.

Creative Solutions for Higher Education Research Issues In Asia and Beyond

The current system of journal metrics adopted by most Western countries appears to marginalize many Asian and Latin American authors. Impact factors (both at the author and journal levels) rely heavily on citation indices which, understandably, favor Western authors. Of course, impact factors are used heavily in research funding decisions. Creative solutions are explored in this paper for Asian countries experiencing these problems.Keywords: journal metrics, impact factor, citation indices.

Writing Cross-Culturally

The editor of College English interviews the noted Nepali American fiction writer Samrat Upadhyay, specifically analyzing with him issues of translation that he has faced in his own work and that he has found in the prose of other Asian and Asian American authors who, like him, primarily address an Anglo-American audience.

Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America

Forthcoming in The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn, ed. Laura Bieger, Ramon Saldivar, and Johannes Voelz (Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England, 2013). Ramon Saldivar‘s contribution is a wide-ranging and spirited piece of critical analysis that deals with the “color line” and its relation to the “cultural imaginary” of Americans. Making virtuosic use of examples drawn from texts by a panoply of different Black, Latino, and Asian American authors, Saldivar interrogates the nature (and existence) of “postethnic fiction.”