Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique

Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique
ISBN-10
0822331403
ISBN-13
9780822331407
Category
History
Pages
228
Language
English
Published
2003-04-17
Publisher
Duke University Press
Author
Kandice Chuh

Description

Imagine Otherwise is an incisive critique of the field of Asian American studies. Recognizing that the rubric "Asian American" elides crucial differences, Kandice Chuh argues for reframing Asian American studies as a study defined not by its subjects and objects, but by its critique. Toward that end, she urges the foregrounding of the constructedness of "Asian American" formations and shows how this understanding of the field provides the basis for continuing to use the term "Asian American" in light of—and in spite of—contemporary critiques about its limitations.

Drawing on the insights of poststructuralist theory, postcolonial studies, and investigations of transnationalism, Imagine Otherwise conceives of Asian American literature and U.S. legal discourse as theoretical texts to be examined for the normative claims about race, gender, and sexuality that they put forth. Reading government and legal documents, novels including Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, John Okada's No-No Boy, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls, and Lois Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging, and the short stories "Immigration Blues" by Bienvenido Santos and "High-Heeled Shoes" by Hisaye Yamamoto, Chuh works through Filipino American and Korean American identity formation and Japanese American internment during World War II as she negotiates the complex and sometimes tense differences that constitute 'Asian America' and Asian American studies.

Other editions

Similar books

  • Experiments in Imagining Otherwise
    By Lola Olufemi

    This is a book of failure and mistakes; it begins with what is stolen from us and proposes only an invitation to imagine. In these playful written experiments, Lola Olufemi navigates the space between what is and what could be.

  • Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
    By Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

    Much gratitude to the English Department at the University of Southern California for inviting me to join the department and guiding me toward success, especially David St. John, Karen Tongson, Elda María Román, ...

  • Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction
    By Sami Schalk

    Outlining (dis)ability's centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through nonrealist contexts.

  • Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
    By Sasha Costanza-Chock

    This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened ...

  • Listening to Images
    By Tina M. Campt

    In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora.

  • Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music
    By Nadine Hubbs

    Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.

  • On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change
    By Jade S. Sasser

    In On Infertile Ground, Jade S. Sasser explores how a small network of international development actors, including private donors, NGO program managers, scientists, and youth advocates, is bringing population back to the center of public ...

  • Imagine Me Gone
    By Adam Haslett

    She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith.

  • Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities
    By Daniel Boyarin, Carlin A. Barton

    ... Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, translated by A. A. Brill. New York: Vintage, 1946 [1913]. — — —. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and ...

  • Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance
    By Sandra Ruiz

    Analyzing the work of artists and revolutionaries like ADÁL, Lebrón, Papo Colo, Pedro Pietri, and Ryan Rivera, Ricanness imagines a Rican future through the time travel extended in their aesthetic interventions, illustrating how they have ...