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"Asian Studies : Asian Literature"
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Asian American literature and the environment
\"This book is a ground-breaking transnational study of representations of the environment in Asian American literature. Extending and renewing Asian American studies and ecocriticism by drawing the two fields into deeper dialogue, it brings Asian American writers to the center of ecocritical studies. This collection demonstrates the distinctiveness of Asian American writers' positions on topics of major concern today: environmental justice, identity and the land, war environments, consumption, urban environments, and the environment and creativity. Represented authors include Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ruth Ozeki, Ha Jin, Fae Myenne Ng, Le Ly Hayslip, Lan Cao, Mitsuye Yamada, Lawson Fusao Inada, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Milton Murayama, Don Lee, Mae Myenne Ng, and Hisaye Yamamoto. These writers provide a range of perspectives on the historical, social, psychological, economic, philosophical, and aesthetic responses of Asian Americans to the environment conceived in relation to labor, racism, immigration, domesticity, global capitalism, relocation, pollution, violence, and religion. Contributors apply a diversity of critical frameworks, including critical radical race studies, counter-memory studies, ecofeminism, and geomantic criticism. The book presents a compelling and timely \"green\" perspective through which to understand key works of Asian American literature and leads the field of ecocriticism into neglected terrain\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Colonizing the Realm of Words
A true tour de force, this book documents the transformation of one Indian literature, Tamil, under the impact of colonialism and Western modernity. While Tamil is a living language, it is also India's second oldest classical language next to Sanskrit, and has a literary history that goes back over two thousand years. On the basis of extensive archival research, Sascha Ebeling tackles a host of issues pertinent to Tamil elite literary production and consumption during the nineteenth century. These include the functioning and decline of traditional systems in which poet-scholars were patronized by religious institutions, landowners, and local kings; the anatomy of changes in textual practices, genres, styles, poetics, themes, tastes, and audiences; and the role of literature in the politics of social reform, gender, and incipient nationalism. The work concludes with a discussion of the most striking literary development of the time—the emergence of the Tamil novel.
eBook
Growing up Asian American in young adult fiction
\"Contributions by Hena Ahmad, Linda Pierce Allen, Mary J. Henderson Couzelis, Sarah Park Dahlen, Lan Dong, Tomo Hattori, Jennifer Ho, Ymitri Mathison, Leah Milne, Joy Takako Taylor, and Traise Yamamoto. Often referred to as the model minority, Asian American children and adolescents feel pressured to perform academically and be disinterested in sports, with the exception of martial arts. Boys are often stereotyped as physically unattractive nerds and girls as petite and beautiful. Many Americans remain unaware of the diversity of ethnicities and races the term Asian American comprises, with Asian American adolescents proving to be more invisible than adults. As a result, Asian American adolescents are continually searching for their identity and own place in American society. For these kids, being or considered to be American becomes a challenge in itself as they assert their Asian and American identities; claim their own ethnic identity, be they immigrant or American-born; and negotiate their ethnic communities. The contributors to Growing Up Asian American in Young Adult Fiction focus on moving beyond stereotypes to examine how Asian American children and adolescents define their unique identities. Chapters focus on primary texts from many ethnicities, such as Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, South Asian, and Hawaiian. Individual chapters, crossing cultural, linguistic, and racial boundaries, negotiate the complex terrain of Asian American children's and teenagers' identities. Chapters cover such topics as internalized racism and self-loathing; hyper-sexualization of Asian American females in graphic novels; interracial friendships; transnational adoptions and birth searches; food as a means of assimilation and resistance; commodity racism and the tourist gaze; the hostile and alienating environment generated by the War on Terror; and many other topics.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Literary Life of Yājñavalkya
In this fascinating study, Steven E. Lindquist investigates the
intersections between historical context and literary production in
the \"life\" of Yājñavalkya, the most important ancient Indian
literary figure prior to the Buddha. Known for his sharp tongue and
deep thought, Yājñavalkya is associated with a number of \"firsts\"
in Indian religious literary history: the first person to discuss
brahman and ātman thoroughly; the first to put
forth a theory of karma and reincarnation; the first to
renounce his household life; and the first to dispute with women in
religious debate. Throughout early Indian history, he was seen as a
priestly bearer of ritual authority, a sage of mystical knowledge,
and an innovative propagator of philosophical ideas and religious
law. Drawing on history, literary studies, ritual studies, Sanskrit
philology, narrative studies, and philosophy, Lindquist traces
Yājñavalkya's literary life-from his earliest mentions in ritual
texts, through his developing biography in the Upaniṣads, and
finally to his role as a hoary sage in narrative
literature-offering the first detailed monograph on this central
figure in early Indian religious and literary history.
eBook
Writers of the Black Chicago renaissance
\"This volume explores the contours and content of the Black Chicago Renaissance. A movement crafted in the crucible of rigid racial segregation in Chicago's \"Black Belt\" from the 1930s through the 1960s, its participants were also heavily influenced by--and influenced --the Harlem Renaissance and the Chicago Renaissance of white writers. Despite harsh segregation, black and white thinkers influenced one another particularly through their engagements with leftist organizations. In many ways, politically, racially, spatially, this was a movement invested in cross-pollination, change, and political activism, as much as literature, art, and aesthetics as it prepared the way for the literature of the Black Arts Movement and beyond. The volume begins with a look at Richard Wright, indisputably a central figure in the Black Chicago Renaissance with the publication of \"Blueprint for Negro Writing.\" Wright sought to distance himself from what he considered to be the failures of the Harlem Renaissance, even as he built upon its aesthetic and cultural legacy. Subsequent chapters discuss Robert Abbott, William Attaway, Claude Barnett, Henry Blakely, Aldon Bland, Edward Bland, Arna Bontemps, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank London Brown, Alice Browning, Dan Burley, Margaret Danner, Frank Marshall Davis, Katherine Dunham, Richard Durham, Lorraine Hansberry, Fenton Johnson, John Johnson, Marian Minus, Williard Motley, Marita Bonner, Gordon Parks, John Sengstacke, Margaret Walker, Theodore Ward, Frank Yerby, Black newspapers, the Chicago School of Sociologists, the Federal Theater Project, Black Music, and John Reed Clubs\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Shaman and the Heresiarch
The Li sao (also known as Encountering Sorrow ),
attributed to the poet-statesman Qu Yuan (4th-3rd century BCE), is
one of the cornerstones of the Chinese poetic tradition. It has
long been studied as China's first extended allegory in poetic
form, yet most scholars agree that there is very little in the
two-thousand-year-old tradition of commentary on it that
convincingly explains its supernatural flights, its complex floral
imagery, or the gender ambiguity of its primary poetic persona.
The Shaman and the Heresiarch is the first book-length
study of the Li sao in English, offering new translations
of both the Li sao and the Nine Songs . The book
traces the shortcomings of the earliest extant commentary on those
texts, that of Wang Yi, back to the quasi-divinatory methods of the
highly politicized tradition of Chinese classical hermeneutics in
general, and the political machinations of a Han dynasty empress
dowager in particular. It also offers an entirely new
interpretation of the Li sao , one based not on Qu Yuan
hagiography but on what late Warring States period artifacts and
texts, including recently unearthed texts, teach us about the
cultural context that produced the poem. In that light we see in
the Li sao not only a reflection of the era of the great
classical Chinese philosophers, but also the breakdown of the
political-religious order of the ancient state of Chu.
eBook
Consumable texts in contemporary India : uncultured books and bibliographical sociology
\"This book examines five areas of English-language publications in India: Indian 'commercial fiction' in English; English translations of Indian vernacular pulp fiction; Hitler's Mein Kampf (which commands a significant market in India and globally); Group Discussion guidebooks; and government 'value education' texts (policy statements, textbooks and related). These kinds of publications are generally neglected by academic researchers, which is itself a matter of interest. Conceptualizing his approach as bibliographical sociology, the author explores the presence of these books in the contemporary Indian context - their productions, circulations and readerships - to understand current social trends. The themes that emerge include perceptions of youth, concerns about education, the status of the English language, the book publishing industry, the relationship between public and private sectors, the drives of global and local forces, and tensions amidst social strata\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Journey of a Goddess
This book offers the first translation into English of the Chinese
novel Haiyouji , as well as excerpts of a marionette play
based on the cult lore of the goddess Chen Jinggu (766-790), a
historical shaman priestess who became one of Fujian's most
important goddesses and the Lüshan Sect's chief deity. The novel, a
1753 reprint of what is possibly a Ming dynasty novel, was both a
popular fiction and a religious tract. It offers a lively
mythological tale depicting combat between the shaman goddess and a
snake demon goddess. Replete with the beliefs and practices of the
cult of this warrior goddess, the novel asserts the importance of
Shamanism (i.e., local religious beliefs) as one of the four
religions of China, along with Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism.
To further develop the links between literature and local religion,
Fan Pen Li Chen includes translations of two acts from a Fujian
marionette play, Biography of the Lady , featuring the
goddess.
eBook
Islam and controversy : the politics of free speech after Rushdie
\"Was Salman Rushdie right to have written The Satanic Verses? Were the protestors right to have protested? What about the Danish cartoons? Is giving offence simply about the right to freedom of expression, and what is really happening when people take offence? Using case studies of a number of Muslim-related freedom of speech controversies surrounding (in)famous, controversial texts such as The Satanic Verses, The Jewel of Medina, the Danish cartoons of Muhammed and the film Submission by Theo van Gogh, this book examines the moral questions raised by such controversies, questions that are often set aside at the time, such as whether the authors and artists involved were right to have done what they did and whether those who protested against them were right to have responded in such a way. In so doing, it argues that the giving and taking of offence are political performances that struggle to define and re-define freedom, and suggests that any attempt to establish a language of inter-cultural communication appropriate to multicultural societies is an ethical as opposed to merely political or legal task, involving dialogue and negotiation over fundamental values and principles. Overall, this important book constitutes a sustained critique of liberal arguments for freedom of speech, in particular of the liberal discourse that took shape in response to the Rushdie controversy and has, in the twenty-five years since, become almost an orthodoxy for many intellectuals, artists, journalists and politicians living and working in Britain (and elsewhere in the West) today. \"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Interpretation and Literature in Early Medieval China
Covering a time of great intellectual ferment and great influence on what was to come, this book explores the literary and hermeneutic world of early medieval China. In addition to profound political changes, the fall of the Han dynasty allowed new currents in aesthetics, literature, interpretation, ethics, and religion to emerge during the Wei-Jin Nanbeichao period. The contributors to this volume present developments in literature and interpretation during this era from a variety of methodological perspectives, frequently highlighting issues hitherto unremarked in Western or even Chinese and Japanese scholarship. These include the rise of new literary and artistic values as the Han declined, changing patterns of patronage that helped reshape literary tastes and genres, and new developments in literary criticism. The religious changes of the period are revealed in the literary self-presentation of spiritual seekers, the influence of Daoism on motifs in poetry, and Buddhist influences on both poetry and historiography. Traditional Chinese literary figures, such as the fox and the ghost, receive fresh analysis about their particular representation during this period.
eBook