Author: Somdutta Mandal
Publisher: Prestige Books
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 616
ISBN/UPC (if available): 817551096X
Description
This anthology in three volumes tries to break new ground by emphasizing upon the Asian American experience in all possible genres - interviews, creative writing, criticism, mass media. Comprising contributions from the American perspective, it attempts to provide a multifarious approach to this oeuvre.
With the emphasis on the concept of cultural pluralism in America, the particularities of individual cultural distinctions owing to race, class, gender, ethnicity, language, region and religion are amalgamated into the predominance of various hyphenated groups. Among them, Asian American literature reflects the Asian experience in the United States —right from the beginning of Chinese immigration in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. As both social document and mirror of memory, myth, dreams, and desire, Asian American literatures provides unique access to understanding the social history and sensibilities of this emerging minority group.
This anthology in three volumes tries to break new ground by emphasizing upon the Asian American experiences in all possible genres — interviews, creative writing, criticism, mass media. Comprising contributions from the American perspective along with the postcolonial Indian response, it attempts to provide a multifarious approach to this oeuvre.
Contents
VOL. 1
Introduction: Somdatta Mandal
CHAPTER I: WRITERS IN CONVERSATION
In Defense of the Real: Frank Chin in Dialogue
Creative Writer, Woman, Academic: Shirley Lim in Dialogue with Charlotte Templin
Home and Abroad: The Politics of Asian-American Representations: A Conversation with Makarand Paranjape
Locating Shirley Geok-lin Lim: an Interview by Nina Morgan
Experiencing from Within: Neila Seshachari in Conversation with Somdatta Mandal
CHAPTER II: THE CREATIVE URGE
Women Organizing for Change: A Personal Analysis
Image from a Stolen Camera: A Short Story and An Auto-ethnographic Recursion
Poems by Satyam S. Moorty
Poems by Purvi Shah
Poems by Trish Salah
Poems by Meena Alexander
A Star-Spangled Romance
Far From Family
Homage to Broward County: The End of the Littoral
Contributors
VOL. 2: Fiction: Novels & Short Stories
Home and Us’: Re-defining Identity in the South Asian Diaspora through the writings of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Meena Alexander
Sisters of the Heart: Female Bonding in the Fiction of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Migration and Settlement in North America in Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction
Resisting Colonial and Postcolonial Hegemonies: Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ethno-Religious discourse
Living in "Amreeka": The Pakistani American Fictional Experience
South Asian Women Re-Write the American Novel: Meena Alexander, Bharati Mukherjee, Bapsi Sidhwa and the 'Bildungsroman'
Writing as Praxis: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Paralogical Narratives
The "Word" on the Ethnic and/or Feminist Assertion of Self: A Reading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s ‘The Woman Warrior’
Exotic Foreign Blooms: The Eaton Sisters and Their Children
"Pearl Harbour Echoes": Japanese American Internment Experience in Monica Sone and Hisaye Yamamoto
Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity in Volcano: Garrett Hongo’s Interventionist Poetics and the Intersectionality of Asian American Identity
Evoking the Exotic: Bharti Kirchner’s ‘Shiva Dancing’
Contributors
VOL. 3: Theory, Poetry and the Performing Arts
CHAPTER 1
The Writer as ‘Trishanku’: Indian Writing in a Foreign Space
Debating Expatriate Women’s Writing from the Indian Subcontinent
Historicizing the colonial, the Postcolonial and the Diaspora of India----A Method
Asian American "Postmodern Historiographic Metafiction": The Politics and Poetics of Generic Transgressions
CHAPTER II: POETIC SENSIBILITIES
From Immigrant "Uncertainty" to Positive "Identity": A Course Traversed in the Poems of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Sharmili Mazumdar, Meena Alexander and Purvi Shah
Text and context: Cross-Cultural Transformations in A K Ramanujan’s ‘The Black Hen’
The Challenge of Asian American Poetry: Reading "I" and "Other" Persona Poems in Cathy Song and David Mura
CHAPTER III: EXPLORING THE PERFORMING ARTS & MASS MEDIA
Asian American Theater and the Postmodern Context
Mira Nair’s "Mississippi Masala" and the South Asian Diaspora
Of ‘Soups’, ‘Salads’, ‘Chutneys’ and ‘Masalas’: The Asian American Film Experience
Contributors