Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996–2020: Volume 4

This volume examines the concerns – political, literary, and identity-based – of contemporary Asian American literatures in neoliberal times.

Betsy Huang (Edited by), Victor Román Mendoza (Edited by)

9781108830843, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 June 2021

414 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.8 cm, 0.74 kg

This volume examines the concerns of Asian American literature from 1996 to the present. This period was not only marked by civil unrest, terror and militarization, economic depression, and environmental abuse, but also unprecedented growth and visibility of Asian American literature. This volume is divided into four sections that plots the trajectories of, and tensions between, social challenges and literary advances. Part One tracks how Asian American literary productions of this period reckon with the effects of structures and networks of violence. Part Two tracks modes of intimacy – desires, loves, close friendships, romances, sexual relations, erotic contacts – that emerge in the face of neoimperialism, neoliberalism, and necropolitics. Part Three traces the proliferation of genres in Asian American writing of the past quarter century in new and in well-worn terrains. Part Four surveys literary projects that speculate on future states of Asian America in domestic and global contexts.

Introduction: Present Tensions, Future Flux Betsy Huang and Victor Román Mendoza
Part I. Neoimperialisms, Neoliberalisms, Necropolitics: 1. Transpacific Ecological Imagination: Envisioning the Anthropocene in Ecocritical Asian North American Literature Jeffrey Santa-Ana
2. Garden in the Machine: Grace Lee Boggs's Living for Change: An Autobiography and Detroit's Urban-Agrarian Future Jina Kim
3. Writing Asia-Latin America: Migrant Intersectionality and Differential Racialization in the Literature of Doris Moromisato and Siu Kam Wen Junyoung Verónica Kim
4. States of Violence Rajini Srikanth
Part II. Intersections, Intimacies: 5. Between the Heteronormative Model Minority and the Homonormative LGBTQ Subject: Historicizing Contemporary Queer Asian American Literature Martin Joseph Ponce
6. Intimacies and Animacies: Queer Ecologies in Asian American Literature Laura Anh Williams
7. Trans Feminism, Asian America's Queer Exception? Stephanie Hsu
8. No Home away from Home: Queer Asian North American Heritage Plots Stephen Hong Sohn
Part III. Genres, Modalities: 9. The Asiatic Model Imagination Mark Jerng
10. Revisualizing Race: Graphic Narratives and Asian American Literature Stella Oh
11. Contemporary Asian American Women's Popular Literature and Neoliberal Form Pamela Thoma
12. This is Not a Page: The Changing Vehicles of Asian American Literature Lawrence-Minh Bui Davis
Part IV, Movements, Speculations: 13. Asian American Literary Studies and the Challenge of Utopia Pacharee Sudhinaraset
14. What is Asian America to Asians?: Two Episodes of Transpacific Disturbance Christopher Patterson
15. Mixed Race Asian American Literature at the Turn into the 21st Century Jennifer Ho
16. Global Asias: On the Structural Incoherence of Imaginable Ageography Tina Chen
Finale, or, Alternative Originaries: Imagining an Asian American Superhero of North Korean Origin Seo-Young Chu.

Subject Areas: Black & Asian studies [JFSL3], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literary theory [DSA]