Transpacific Attachments

Author : Lily Wong
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 223 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2018-02-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231544887

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Transpacific Attachments by Lily Wong Pdf

The figure of the Chinese sex worker—who provokes both disdain and desire—has become a trope for both Asian American sexuality and Asian modernity. Lingering in the cultural imagination, sex workers link sexual and cultural marginality, and their tales clarify the boundaries of citizenship, nationalism, and internationalism. In Transpacific Attachments, Lily Wong studies the mobility and mobilization of the sex worker figure through transpacific media networks, illuminating the intersectional politics of racial, sexual, and class structures. Transpacific Attachments examines shifting depictions of Chinese sex workers in popular media—from literature to film to new media—that have circulated within the United States, China, and Sinophone communities from the early twentieth century to the present. Wong explores Asian American writers’ articulation of transnational belonging; early Hollywood’s depiction of Chinese women as parasitic prostitutes and Chinese cinema’s reframing the figure as a call for reform; Cold War–era use of prostitute and courtesan metaphors to question nationalist narratives and heteronormativity; and images of immigrant brides against the backdrop of neoliberalism and the flows of transnational capital. She focuses on the transpacific networks that reconfigure Chineseness, complicating a diasporic framework of cultural authenticity. While imaginations of a global community have long been mobilized through romantic, erotic, and gendered representations, Wong stresses the significant role sex work plays in the constant restructuring of social relations. “Chineseness,” the figure of the sex worker shows, is an affective product as much as an ethnic or cultural signifier.

Author : Fan Yang
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2024-06-03
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780472904464

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Disorienting Politics by Fan Yang Pdf

Disorienting Politics mines 21st-century media artifacts—including films like The Martian and TV/streaming media shows such as Firefly and House of Cards—to make visible the economic, cultural, political, and ecological entanglements of China and the United States. Describing these transpacific entanglements as “Chimerica”—coined by economic historians to reference the symbiosis of China and America—Yang examines how Chimerican media, originating in the US but traversing national boundaries in their production, circulation, and consumption, co-create the figure of rising China and extend a political imagination beyond the conventional ground of the nation. Examining how Chimerican media are shaped by and perpetuate uneven power relations, Disorienting Politics argues that the pervasive tendency among wide-ranging cultural producers to depict the Chinese state as a racialized Other in American media life diminishes the possibility of engaging transpacific entanglements as a basis for envisioning new political horizons. Such othering of China not only results in overt racism against people of Asian descent, Yang argues, but also impacts the wellbeing of people of color more generally. This interdisciplinary book demonstrates the ways in which race is embedded in geopolitics even when the subject of discussion is not the people, but the (Chinese) state. Bridging media and cultural studies, Asian and Asian American studies, geography, and globalization studies, Disorienting Politics calls for a relational politics that acknowledges the multifarious interconnectivity between people, places, media, and environment.

Author : Tze-Yin Teo
Publisher : Fordham University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2022-04-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781531500214

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If Babel Had a Form by Tze-Yin Teo Pdf

“The likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences,” writes the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa around 1906, “renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy.” If Babel Had a Form asks not if his claim may be true, but what its phantasmic surprise may yet do. In twentieth-century intersections of China and Asia with the United States, translations did more than communicate meaning across politicized and racializing differences of language and nation. Transpacific translation breached the regulative protocols that created those very differences of human value and cultural meaning. The result, Tze-Yin Teo argues, saw translators cleaving to the sounds and shapes of poetry to imagine a translingual “likeness of form” but not of meaning or kind. At stake in this form without meaning is a startling new task of equivalence. As a concept, equivalence has been rejected for its colonizing epistemology of value, naming a broken promise of translation and false premise of comparison. Yet the writers studied in this book veered from those ways of knowing to theorize a poetic equivalence: negating the colonial foundations of the concept, they ignited aporias of meaning into flashpoints for a radical literary translation. The book’s transpacific readings glean those forms of equivalence from the writing of Fenollosa, the vernacular experiments of Boxer Scholar Hu Shi, the trilingual musings of Shanghai-born Los Angeles novelist Eileen Chang, the minor work of the Bay Area Korean American transmedial artist Theresa Cha, and a post-Tiananmen elegy by the exiled dissident Yang Lian. The conclusion returns to the deconstructive genealogy of recent debates on translation and untranslatability, displacing the axiom of radical alterity for a no less radical equivalence that remains—pace Fenollosa—far from easy or exceptional. Ultimately, If Babel Had a Form illuminates the demanding force of even the slightest sameness entangled in the translator’s work of remaking our differences.

Author : Howard Chiang,Alvin K. Wong
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 398 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2020-04-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000055788

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Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies by Howard Chiang,Alvin K. Wong Pdf

This volume showcases a vibrant wave of scholarship that explores the intersection of queer theory and Sinophone studies, consolidating an interdisciplinary framework for furthering transnational research into non-conforming genders, sexualities and bodies. Engaging with contemporary debates and controversies, Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies presents a definitive collection of original contributions, which are both theoretically and empirically grounded and cross-disciplinary in nature. Individual chapters offer an in-depth study of new empirical data and case studies, covering keywords such as transpacific, viscerality, fandom, postcoloniality, ethnicity and activism. Imagining new conversations across several fields, including literature, film, communication, ethnic studies, anthropology, history, sociology and politics, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Queer Studies and Asian culture, literature and film, as well as gender and sexuality.

Author : Janet Alison Hoskins,Viet Thanh Nguyen
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 282 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2014-08-31
Category : History
ISBN : 9780824847746

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Transpacific Studies by Janet Alison Hoskins,Viet Thanh Nguyen Pdf

The Pacific has long been a space of conquest, exploration, fantasy, and resistance. Pacific Islanders had established civilizations and cultures of travel well before European explorers arrived, initiating centuries of upheaval and transformation. The twentieth century, with its various wars fought in and over the Pacific, is only the most recent era to witness military strife and economic competition. While “Asia Pacific” and “Pacific Rim” were late twentieth-century terms that dealt with the importance of the Pacific to the economic, political, and cultural arrangements that span Asia and the Americas, a new term has arisen—the transpacific. In the twenty-first century, U.S. efforts to dominate the ocean are symbolized not only in the “Pacific pivot” of American policy but also the development of a Transpacific Partnership. This partnership brings together a dozen countries—not including China—in a trade pact whose aim is to cement U.S. influence. That pact signals how the transpacific, up to now an academic term, has reached mass consciousness. Recognizing the increasing importance of the transpacific as a word and concept, this anthology proposes a framework for transpacific studies that examines the flows of culture, capital, ideas, and labor across the Pacific. These flows involve Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. The introduction to the anthology by its editors, Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, consider the advantages and limitations of models found in Asian studies, American studies, and Asian American studies for dealing with these flows. The editors argue that transpacific studies can draw from all three in order to provide a critical model for considering the geopolitical struggle over the Pacific, with its attendant possibilities for inequality and exploitation. Transpacific studies also sheds light on the cultural and political movements, artistic works, and ideas that have arisen to contest state, corporate, and military ambitions. In sum, the transpacific as a concept illuminates how flows across the Pacific can be harnessed for purposes of both domination and resistance. The anthology’s contributors include geographers (Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Weiqiang Lin), sociologists (Yen Le Espiritu, Hung Cam Thai), literary critics (John Carlos Rowe, J. Francisco Benitez, Yunte Huang, Viet Thanh Nguyen), and anthropologists (Xiang Biao, Heonik Kwon, Nancy Lutkehaus, Janet Hoskins), as well as a historian (Laurie J. Sears), and a film scholar (Akira Lippit). Together these contributors demonstrate how a transpacific model can be deployed across multiple disciplines and from varied locations, with scholars working from the United States, Singapore, Japan and England. Topics include the Cold War, the Chinese state, U.S. imperialism, diasporic and refugee cultures and economies, national cinemas, transpacific art, and the view of the transpacific from Asia. These varied topics are a result of the anthology’s purpose in bringing scholars into conversation and illuminating how location influences the perception of the transpacific. But regardless of the individual view, what the essays gathered here collectively demonstrate is the energy, excitement, and insight that can be generated from within a transpacific framework.

Author : Howard Chiang
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2021-04-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780231549172

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Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific by Howard Chiang Pdf

As a broad category of identity, “transgender” has given life to a vibrant field of academic research since the 1990s. Yet the Western origins of the field have tended to limit its cross-cultural scope. Howard Chiang proposes a new paradigm for doing transgender history in which geopolitics assumes central importance. Defined as the antidote to transphobia, transtopia challenges a minoritarian view of transgender experience and makes room for the variability of transness on a historical continuum. Against the backdrop of the Sinophone Pacific, Chiang argues that the concept of transgender identity must be rethought beyond a purely Western frame. At the same time, he challenges China-centrism in the study of East Asian gender and sexual configurations. Chiang brings Sinophone studies to bear on trans theory to deconstruct the ways in which sexual normativity and Chinese imperialism have been produced through one another. Grounded in an eclectic range of sources—from the archives of sexology to press reports of intersexuality, films about castration, and records of social activism—this book reorients anti-transphobic inquiry at the crossroads of area studies, medical humanities, and queer theory. Timely and provocative, Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific highlights the urgency of interdisciplinary knowledge in debates over the promise and future of human diversity.

Author : Robin Visser
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 213 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2023-09-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231553292

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Questioning Borders by Robin Visser Pdf

Indigenous knowledge of local ecosystems often challenges settler-colonial cosmologies that naturalize resource extraction and the relocation of nomadic, hunting, foraging, or fishing peoples. Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. Informed by extensive field research, Robin Visser compares literary works by Bai, Bunun, Kazakh, Mongol, Tao, Tibetan, Uyghur, Wa, Yi, and Han Chinese writers set in Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Southwest China, and Taiwan, sites of extensive development, migration, and climate change impacts. Visser contrasts the dominant Han Chinese cosmology of center and periphery that informs what she calls “Beijing Westerns” with Indigenous and hybridized ways of relating to the world that challenge borders, binaries, and hierarchies. By centering Indigenous cosmologies, this book aims to decolonize approaches to ecocriticism, comparative literature, and Chinese and Sinophone studies as well as to inspire new modes of sustainable flourishing in the Anthropocene.

Author : Cheow Thia Chan
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 165 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2022-12-27
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231555029

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Malaysian Crossings by Cheow Thia Chan Pdf

Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature is marginalized on several fronts. In the international literary space, which privileges the West, Malaysia is considered remote. The institutions of modern Chinese literature favor mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Within Malaysia, only texts in Malay, the national language, are considered national literature by the state. However, Mahua authors have produced creative and thought-provoking works that have won growing critical recognition, showing Malaysia to be a laboratory for imaginative Chinese writing. Highlighting Mahua literature’s distinctive mode of evolution, Cheow Thia Chan demonstrates that authors’ grasp of their marginality in the world-Chinese literary space has been the impetus for—rather than a barrier to—aesthetic inventiveness. He foregrounds the historical links between Malaysia and other Chinese-speaking regions, tracing how Mahua writers engage in the “worlding” of modern Chinese literature by navigating interconnected literary spaces. Focusing on writers including Lin Cantian, Han Suyin, Wang Anyi, and Li Yongping, whose works craft signature literary languages, Chan examines narrative representations of multilingual social realities and authorial reflections on colonial Malaya or independent Malaysia as valid literary terrain. Delineating the inter-Asian “crossings” of Mahua literary production—physical journeys, interactions among social groups, and mindset shifts—from the 1930s to the 2000s, he contends that new perspectives from the periphery are essential to understanding the globalization of modern Chinese literature. By emphasizing the inner diversities and connected histories in the margins, Malaysian Crossings offers a powerful argument for remapping global Chinese literature and world literature.

Author : Mingwei Song
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2023-10-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231555531

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Fear of Seeing by Mingwei Song Pdf

A new wave of cutting-edge, risk-taking science fiction has energized twenty-first-century Chinese literature. These works capture the anticipation and anxieties of China’s new era, speaking to a future filled with uncertainties. Deeply entangled with the politics and culture of a changing China, contemporary science fiction has also attracted a growing global readership. Fear of Seeing traces the new wave’s origin and development over the past three decades, exploring the core concerns and literary strategies that make it so distinctive and vital. Mingwei Song argues that recent Chinese science fiction is united by a capacity to illuminate what had been invisible—what society had chosen not to see; what conventional literature had failed to represent. Its poetics of the invisible opens up new literary possibilities and inspires new ways of telling stories about China and the world. Reading the works of major writers such as Liu Cixin and Han Song as well as lesser-known figures, Song explores how science fiction has spurred larger changes in contemporary literature and culture. He analyzes key topics: variations of utopia and dystopia, cyborgs and the posthuman, and nonbinary perspectives on gender and genre, among many more. A compelling and authoritative account of the politics and poetics of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Fear of Seeing is an important book for all readers interested in the genre’s significance for twenty-first-century literature.

Author : Petrus Liu
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 129 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2022-12-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781478024057

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The Specter of Materialism by Petrus Liu Pdf

In recent years, queer theory appears to have made a materialist turn away from questions of representation and performativity to those of dispossession, precarity, and the differential distribution of life chances. Despite this shift, queer theory finds itself constantly reabsorbed into the liberal project of diversity management. This theoretical and political weakness, Petrus Liu argues, stems from an incomplete understanding of capitalism’s contemporary transformations, of which China has been at the center. In The Specter of Materialism Liu challenges key premises of classic queer theory and Marxism, turning to an analysis of the Beijing Consensus—global capitalism’s latest mutation—to develop a new theory of the political economy of sexuality. Liu explores how relations of gender and sexuality get reconfigured to meet the needs of capital in new regimes of accumulation and dispossession, demonstrating that evolving US-Asian economic relations shape the emergence of new queer identities and academic theories. In so doing, he offers a new history of collective struggles that provides a transnational framework for understanding the nexus between queerness and material life.

Author : Geng Song
Publisher : University of Michigan Press
Page : 253 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2022-05-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780472220045

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Televising Chineseness by Geng Song Pdf

The serial narrative is one of the most robust and popular forms of storytelling in contemporary China. With a domestic audience of one billion-plus and growing transnational influence and accessibility, this form of storytelling is becoming the centerpiece of a fast-growing digital entertainment industry and a new symbol and carrier of China’s soft power. Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity explores how television and online dramas imagine the Chinese nation and form postsocialist Chinese gendered subjects. The book addresses a conspicuous paradox in Chinese popular culture today: the coexistence of increasingly diverse gender presentations and conservative gender policing by the government, viewers, and society. Using first-hand data collected through interviews and focus group discussions with audiences comprising viewers of different ages, genders, and educational backgrounds, Televising Chineseness sheds light on how television culture relates to the power mechanisms and truth regimes that shape the understanding of gender and the construction of gendered subjects in postsocialist China.

Author : Laura Lazzari,Nathalie Ségeral
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2021-11-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783030774073

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Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture by Laura Lazzari,Nathalie Ségeral Pdf

Trauma and Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture repositions motherhood studies through the lens of trauma theory by exploring new challenges surrounding conception, pregnancy, and postpartum experiences. Chapters investigate nine case studies of motherhood trauma and recovery in literature and culture from the last twenty years by exploring their emotional consequences through the lens of trauma, resilience, and “working through” theories. Contributions engage with a transnational corpus drawn from the five continents and span topics as rarely discussed as pregnancy denial, surrogacy, voluntary or involuntary childlessness, racism and motherhood, carceral mothering practices, surrogacy, IVF, artificial wombs, and mothering through war, genocide, and migration. Accompanied by an online creative supplement, this volume deals with silenced aspects of embodied motherhood while enhancing a better understanding of the cathartic effects of storytelling.

Author : Bernard Wilson
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 608 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2024-06-30
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9789819725007

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The Asian Family in Literature and Film by Bernard Wilson Pdf

Author : Jon Douglas Solomon
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 511 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2023-06-29
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9789819933228

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The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana by Jon Douglas Solomon Pdf

This book constitutes a timely intervention into debates over the status of Taiwan, at a moment when discussions of democracy and autocracy, imperialism and agency, unipolarity and multipolarity, dominate the intellectual agenda of the day. Pursuing a parallel trajectory that is both epistemic and historical, that is traced out in relation both to Taiwan’s recent history and to the disparate forms of knowledge production about that history, this work engages in scholarly debate about some of the burning issues of our time, including transitional justice, hegemony and conspiracy in the digital age, debt regimes, cultural difference, national language, and the traumatic legacies of war, colonialism, anticommunism, antiblackness, and neoliberalism. Providing trenchant analyses of the fundamental bipolarity that persists amidst both unipolar and multipolar conceptions of the world schema inherited from the colonial-imperial modernity, this book will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including translation studies, postcolonial studies, Marxism studies, trauma studies, media studies, poststructural theory, gender studies, cold war studies, area studies, American studies, black studies, and so forth.

Author : United States. Congress. House
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 2782 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 1958
Category : Electronic
ISBN : UOM:35112104237872

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Hearings by United States. Congress. House Pdf