This trio of books pulls together several strands of intellectual inquiry across academic disciplines. As a set, they nevertheless converge in their elaboration of what might be called a history of transpacific or a prehistory of Asian American literature, not so much in terms of opening an archive but instead in questioning the value and boundaries of canonical inclusion. In this regard, each work implicitly or explicitly asks how Asian American critique might facilitate new understandings of literature and cultural circulation prior to the formal instantiation of both the term Asian American and the larger field of inquiry that it names. To be clear, the texts tend to emphasize the transpacific, following scholars like Yunte Huang, Denise Cruz, and Viet Thanh Nguyen as a way of thinking through what So calls “the humanist principles of literature and art rather than politics or the market” (217) that have dominated Pacific Rim...
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A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific
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June 1, 2019
Book Review|
June 01 2019
A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific
Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network
Invisible Subjects: Asian America in Postwar Literature
A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific
. By Hsu, Hua. Cambridge, MA
: Harvard Univ. Press
. 2016
. 276 pp. Cloth, $29.95.Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network
. By So, Richard Jean. New York
: Columbia Univ. Press
. 2016
. xxxix, 260 pp. Cloth, $60.00; e-book, $59.99.Invisible Subjects: Asian America in Postwar Literature
. By Kim, Heidi. Oxford
: Oxford Univ. Press
. 2016
. xii, 233 pp. Cloth, $74.00.
Sean Metzger
Sean Metzger
Sean Metzger is a professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. He is the author of Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race (Indiana Univ. Press, 2014) and has also edited five anthologies. He is the current president of Performance Studies international.
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American Literature (2019) 91 (2): 426–428.
Citation
Sean Metzger; A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific
Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network
Invisible Subjects: Asian America in Postwar Literature. American Literature 1 June 2019; 91 (2): 426–428. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7529239
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