Examining nine Asian Canadian and Asian American narratives, Eleanor Ty explores how authors empower themselves, represent differences, and re-script their identities as 'visible minorities' within the ideological, imaginative, and discursive space given to them by dominant culture. In various ways, Asian North Americans negotiate daily with 'birthmarks,' their shared physical features marking them legally, socially, and culturally as visible outsiders, and paradoxically, as invisible to mainstream history and culture.
Ty argues that writers such as Denise Chong, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Wayson Choy recast the marks of their bodies and challenge common perceptions of difference based on the sights, smells, dress, and other characteristics of their hyphenated lives. Others, like filmmaker Mina Shum and writers Bienvenido Santos and Hiromi Goto, challenge the means by which Asian North American subjects are represented and constructed in the media and in everyday language. Through close readings grounded in the socio-historical context of each work, Ty studies the techniques of various authors and filmmakers in their meeting of the gaze of dominant culture and their response to the assumptions and meanings commonly associated with Orientalized, visible bodies.
Authors
- Bibliography, etc. Note
- Includes bibliographical references (p. [203]-218) and index
- Control Number Identifier
- CaOOCEL
- Dewey Decimal Classification Number
- 818/.540809895071
- Dewey Decimal Edition Number
- 22
- General Note
- Issued as part of the desLibris books collection
- ISBN
- 9781442682122 0802088317
- LCCN
- PR9188.2.A74
- LCCN Item number
- T9 2004eb
- Modifying agency
- CaBNVSL
- Original cataloging agency
- CaOONL
- Physical Description | Extent
- 1 electronic text (xv, 227 p.)
- Published in
- Canada
- Publisher or Distributor Number
- CaOOCEL
- Rights
- Access restricted to authorized users and institutions
- System Control Number
- (CaBNVSL)thg00601002 (OCoLC)244768460 (CaOOCEL)418544
- System Details Note
- Mode of access: World Wide Web
- Transcribing agency
- CaOONL
Table of Contents
- Contents 6
- Acknowledgments 8
- Preface 10
- Introduction 20
- PART I: VISUALITY, REPRESENTATION, AND THE GAZE 48
- 1 Writing Historiographic Autoethnography: Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children 50
- 2 A Filipino Prufrock in an Alien Land: Bienvenido Santos's The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor 71
- 3 Rescripting Hollywood: Performativity and Ethnic Identity in Mina Shum's Double Happiness 86
- PART II: TRANSFORMATIONS THROUGH THE SENSUAL 100
- 4 To Make Sense of Differences: Communities, Texts, and Bodies in Shirley Geok-lin Lim's Among the White Moon Faces 102
- 5 'Some Memories Live Only on Your Tongue': Recalling Tastes, Reclaiming Desire in Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife 118
- 6 'Each Story Brief and Sad and Marvellous': Multiple Voices in Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony 133
- PART III: INVISIBLE MINORITIES IN ASIAN AMERICA 152
- 7 'Never Again Be the Yvonne of Yesterday': Personal and Collective Loss in Cecilia Brainard's When the Rainbow Goddess Wept 154
- 8 'Thrumming Songs of Ecstasy': Female Voices in Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms 169
- 9 'On the Fence That Was Never Finished': Borderline Filipino Existence in Bino Realuyo's The Umbrella Country 186
- Afterword 202
- Notes 206
- Works Cited 220
- Index 236
- A 236
- B 236
- C 237
- D 238
- E 238
- F 238
- G 239
- H 239
- I 239
- J 240
- K 240
- L 240
- M 241
- N 241
- O 241
- P 242
- Q 242
- R 242
- S 242
- T 243
- U 244
- V 244
- W 244
- X 244
- Y 244
- Z 244
