Rocío G. Davis

mediating history in Asian American family memoirs

Relative histories

Carmen Birkle

William Q. Boelhower

Sites of Ethnicity brings together contributions from scholars in Canada, the U.K., Finland, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United States who share an interest in exploring the theoretical possibilities of site analysis and the crucial role of place and spatial tactics in multi-ethnic societies. The strategic means for deciphering total social facts-comprising broad issues such as travel, subject positioning, identity, ethnicity, culture, memory-are as diverse and wide-ranging as the contributors to this volume. Manifestations of ethnicity in literature and non-literary texts, music, food, TV series, photographs, and even gravesites, are revealed to be constructed, performed, eaten, remembered, desired, and imagined as important sites for a definition of both individual and collective identities that, when studied in-depth, prove consistently elusive, fluid, and always already deferred. The papers present a vision of a world that is increasingly a global village, one in which memory and local place help measure various forms of ethnic representation through a reflection of possible sites of cultural engagement and agency.

Europe and the Americas

Sites of Ethnicity

In their different and yet complementary perspectives, all of the essays in this collection reiterate the universal lesson of pluralism. They are divided into sections that deal with biraciality and biculturality, interethnic negotiations, poetic creations, narrative experiments, and (re)constructing self. The wide variety of approaches reflects the contributors' training in different cultures and across cultures. The book showcases refreshing new perspectives in reading that combine the views of literary scholars from three different continents. This collection creates a space for discussion and commentary, of heightened appreciation and increased creativity, a forum that turns the discipline of Asian American Studies into a truly intercultural debate.

Readings on Fiction, Poetry and Performance

Asian American Literature in the International Context

Dorothea Fischer-Hornung

Johanna C. Kardux

This volume analyzes innovative forms of media and music (art installations, television commercials, photography, films, songs, telenovelas) to examine the performance of migration in contemporary culture. Though migration studies and media studies are ostensibly different fields, this transnational collection of essays addresses how their interconnection has shaped our understanding of the paradigms through which we think about migration, ethnicity, nation, and the transnational. Cultural representations intervene in collective beliefs. Art and media clearly influence the ways the experience of migration is articulated and recalled, intervening in individual perceptions as well as public policy. To understand the connection between migration and diverse media, the authors examine how migration is represented in film, television, music, and art, but also how media shape the ways in which host country and homeland are imagined. Among the topics considered are new mediated forms for representing migration, widening the perspective on the ways these representations may be analyzed; readings of enactments of memory in trans- and inter-disciplinary ways; and discussions of globalization and transnationalism, inviting us to rethink traditional borders in respect to migration, nation states, as well as disciplines.

Performing Migration

Aesthetic Practices and Politics in Media, Music, and Art

This work focuses the Asian American memoir that specifically recounts the story of at least three generations of the same family. This form of autobiography concentrates as much on other members of one's family as on oneself, generally collapses the boundaries conventionally established between biography and autobiography, and in many cases crosses the frontier into history, promoting collective memory.

Mediating History in Asian American Family Memoirs

Relative Histories

An analytically innovative work, Begin Here widens the current critical focus of Asian North American literary studies by proposing an integrated thematic and narratological approach to the practice of autobiography. It demonstrates how Asian North American memoirs of childhood challenge the construction and performative potential of national experiences. This understanding influences theoretical approaches to ethnic life writing, expanding the boundaries of traditional autobiography by negotiating narrative techniques and genre and raising complex questions about self-representation and the construction of cultural memory.

Jaume Aurell

Jaume Aurell i Cardona

Ana Beatriz Delgado

This collection focuses on how literary creativity and historical inscriptions produce texts that require nuanced readings of forms of life writing. These reflections support the use of life writing as an interpretative frame for historical information, validating it for historical discourse as the act of telling and writing one's story affirms as it performs identity. The approach is based on a methodology that connects genre studies and historiography, to arrive at conclusions about the writing of the history of globalization, immigration, racial and ethnic negotiation.

Genres, Performance, and Culture

Ethnic Life Writing and Histories

Rosalía Baena

Studies of literary reflections on ethnicity are essential to the ever-renewed definition of Canadian literature. The essays in this collection explore the diverse ways of negotiating identity and the articulation of space in Canada, taking ethnicity as a driving force with ideological and cultural implications that lend public and literary discourse an urgent dynamism. While theorizing ethnicity is a valuable critical enterprise, these essays centre on the concrete realization of the problematics of ethnicity in creative writing, covering a wide range of Canada's mosaic. The creative inscription of ethnicity stimulates the evolution and expansion of Canada's literary heritage, the complexity of this cultural experience being the focus of the present collection. Fourteen essays, including a personal account by the Ukrainian-Canadian Janice Kulyk Keefer on the merging of private and public history, and two interviews - with the Chinese-Canadian writer Wayson Choy and the critic Linda Hutcheon - analyze the manifestations of the pluralism that has always characterized Canadian writers' consciousness of themselves, their engagement with the notion of the 'multicultural' and its significance in contemporary society and, in particular, its effect on creativity.

Writing Ethnicity in Canada

Tricks with a Glass

This book studies the transnational nature of American cultural production, specifically literature, film, and music, examining how these serve as ways of perceiving the United States and American culture. The volume’s engagement with the reality of transnationalism focuses on material examples that allow for an exploration of concrete manifestations of this phenomenon and trace its development within and outside the United States. Contributors consider the ways in which artifacts or manifestations of American culture have traveled and what has happened to the texts in the process, inviting readers to examine the nature of the transnational turn by highlighting the cultural products that represent and produce it. Emphasis on literature, film, and music allows for nuanced perspectives on the way a global phenomenon is enacted in American texts within the U.S, also illustrating the commodification of American culture as these texts travel. The volume therefore serves as a coherent examination of the critical and creative repercussions of transnationalism, and, by juxtaposing a discussion of creativity with critical paradigms, unveils how transnationalism has become one of the constitutive modes of cultural production in the 21st century.

Rocío G. Davis

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