Overview

Nation, Race & History in Asian American Literature reflects on the symbolic processes through which the United States constitutes its subjects as citizens, connecting such processes to the global dynamics of empire building and a suppressed history of American imperialism. Through a comparative analysis of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging, and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, this study considers the ways in which bodies challenge the categories asserted in nation-building. The book proposes that underwritten by the vast histories of American imperial migrations, there are texts and bodies which challenge and reconstitute the ever-vexed definition of «American». In «re-membering» such bodies, Maria C. Zamora proclaims our bodies as actual living texts, texts that are constantly bearing, contesting, and transforming meaning. Nation, Race & History in Asian American Literature will engage scholars interested in cultural and critical theory, citizenship and national identity, race and ethnicity, the body, gender studies, and transnational literature.

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9781433102684

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Reviews

With haunting eloquence, Maria C. Zamora argues for 'the sway of the figurative regime' over the material body that is, at once, elusive, irreducible and transformative. Reading gendered, sexualized, and raced bodies as living texts in canonical Asian American works, Zamora compellingly re-maps American national identity through these unwieldy but spectacular literary and bodily texts located at the geopolitical margins of United States empire. (Allan Punzalan Isaac, Associate Professor of American Studies and English, Rutgers University, Author of 'American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America')

With haunting eloquence, Maria C. Zamora argues for 'the sway of the figurative regime' over the material body that is, at once, elusive, irreducible and transformative. Reading gendered, sexualized, and raced bodies as living texts in canonical Asian American works, Zamora compellingly re-maps American national identity through these unwieldy but spectacular literary and bodily texts located at the geopolitical margins of United States empire. (Allan Punzalan Isaac, Associate Professor of American Studies and English, Rutgers University, Author of 'American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America')

Author Information

The Author: Maria (Mia) C. Zamora is Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of the World Literature Program at Kean University in New Jersey. Dr. Zamora completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was a fellow of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and a Fulbright scholar.

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