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Symposium
on Asian American Literary Studies
(featuring
Maxine Hong Kingston)
 Thursday,
Feb. 23, 2006, 1:00-6:00 PM, McCune Room, 6020 HSSB
Click
here to download a symposium poster.
Schedule
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Biographies
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Books
Featuring an interview with novelist Maxine Hong
Kington, this special half-day symposium includes two
panel discussions on critical issues in Asian American
literary and cultural studies. The symposium will conclude
with a reception to celebrate the release of a new collection
of essays, Transnational Asian American Literature:
Sites and Transits, edited by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim,
John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn and Gina Valentino.
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| Schedule
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Welcome:
Carl Gutiérrez-Jones, ACGCC Director
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| 1:00-2:20
PM: Poetry, Protests and War |
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Yunte Huang |
English, UCSB |
To Be an Asian American Poet |
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James Kyung-Jin Lee |
Asian American Studies, UCSB |
Asian American Literature and the Warfare
Imperative |
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Karen Tei Yamashita |
Literature, UCSC |
A Reading from I Hotel: Writing the
Asian American Movement |
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Panel
Moderator: Bishnu Ghosh (English, UCSB)
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2:20-2:30
PM: Break with refreshments
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| 2:30-3:50
PM: Pollution, Cities and Ethnic Chick Lit |
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John Gamber |
English, UCSB |
"Dancing with Goblins in Plastic Jungles:"
Pollution in Karen Yamashita's Through the Arc
of the Rainforest |
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Caroline Kyungah Hong |
English, UCSB |
"A happy ending without a wedding": Caroline
Hwang's In Full Bloom as Ethnic Chick Lit |
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Stephen Hong Sohn |
English, UCSB |
"Following the Bread Crumbs through the Haunted
Forest:" The Racialized Female Detective and
Urban Textual Recovery in Suki Kim's Interpreter. |
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Panel
Moderator: Carl Gutiérrez-Jones (English, UCSB) |
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4:00-5:00
PM: Maxine Hong Kingston with Shirley Geok-Lin Lim
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| 5:00-6:00
PM: Reception and Book Release Celebration |
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Biographies |
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| Yunte Huang came to
the U.S. in 1991 after graduating from Peking University
with a B.A. in English. He received his Ph.D. from the Poetics
Program at SUNY-Buffalo in 1999 and taught as an Assistant
Professor of English at Harvard University from 1999-2003.
He is the author of
CRIBS (2005), Transpacific
Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual
Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature
(2002), and
Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (1997),
and the translator into Chinese of Ezra Pound's The Pisan
Cantos. He is currently working on two book projects,
"The Deadly Space Between": Literature and History in
the Age of Transpacific Imagination and Glocal Poetics:
A Thick Description. |
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| Maxine
Hong Kingston is recognized for
her epic novels that detail the experiences of first-generation
Chinese Americans. She graduated from the University of
Califonia, Berkeley, and soon after became a high school
teacher, holding a series of teaching jobs for the next
ten years. Her most recognized work is also her first published,
Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
(1976), and received the National Book Critic's Circle Award
for nonfiction. Woman Warrior combines Chinese folk stories,
myth, and her family's experience as immigrants in the United
States. Her second book, China Men (1980), expanded
upon Woman Warrior and was awarded the American Book Award
in nonfiction. China Men reveals the work experiences and
discrimination faced by the men in her family. Kingston's
third book, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989),
describes the experiences of Whittman Ah Sing (after Walt
Whitman), an Asian American hippie in the 1960s. The book
pays homage to Joyce's Ulysses in its post-modern
structure and description of the narrator's unique odyssey.
Her most recent work The
Fifth Book of Peace (2003) considers the Vietnam
War and the current war in Iraq, shaping a moving new literary
form in the spirit of nonviolence. |
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| Jim
Lee is an assistant professor of Asian American
Studies at UCSB, and is the author of Urban
Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism
(U of Minn. P, 2004). Before coming to UCSB, he served as
Associate Director of the Center for Asian American Studies
at the University of Texas at Austin, where he also taught
in Department of English. He received his Ph.D. in English
and M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA. |
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| Shirley
Geok-Lin Lim is a Professor in the English Department
at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received
her Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1973, and has also
taught at internationally, at the National University of
Singapore, NIE of Nanyang Technological University, and
most recently as Chair Professor at the University of Hong
Kong. Her research interests include Asian-American and
post-colonial cultural productions and ethnic and feminist
writing. She is the author of five books of poems; three
books of short stories; two books of criticism: Nationalism
and Literature (1993) and Writing South/East Asia
in English: Against the Grain (1994); a book of memoirs,
Among
the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands
(1996), and two novels, Joss
and Gold (2001) and Sister
Swing (2006). She has served as editor/co-editor
of numerous scholarly works, including The Forbidden
Stich (1989), Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s
The Woman Warror (1991), and Transnational Asia
Pacific (1999). Professor Lim is currently at work
on a study of gender and nation in Asian American representations. |
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| Karen
Tei Yamashita is a Japanese American writer from
California. She lived for nine years in Brazil, the setting
for her first two novels, Through
the Arc of the Rain Forest, published in 1990 and
awarded the American Book Award and The Janet Heidinger
Kafka Award, and Brazil-Maru, named by the Village Voice
as one of the 25 best books of 1992. Her third novel set
in Los Angeles, Tropic
of Orange published in 1997, and was a finalist
for the Paterson Fiction Prize. A fourth book of mix genres
in fiction and nonfiction, Circle
K Cycles, is based on her research of the Brazilian
community in Japan and was published in the spring of 2001
by Coffee House Press. Currently, she is Associate Professor
of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. |
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| Books
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Transnational Asian American Literature:
Sites and Transits |
Sister Swing |
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 Transnational
Asian American Literature:
Sites and Transits
edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim,
John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn and Gina Valentino
paper 1-59213-451-3 $24.95
cloth 1-59213-450-5 $74.50
320 pp 6x9 1 table
 Buy
This Book!
"Increasingly commonplace yet still
elusive, ideas of 'transnationalism' and 'diaspora' in
Asian American studies get an energetic boost from this
collection of highly readable critical essays. Looking
for the cross-national, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic,
and searching for global identity formations, the editors
have stretched the boundaries and re-shaped Asian American
literature, confirming once again that the field is dynamic
and unstable."
—Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Professor of History and Ethnic
Studies and Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity
and Race in America, Brown University |
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| Transnational
Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits examines
the diasporic and transnational aspects of Asian American
literature and asserts the importance of a globalized imaginary
in what has been considered an ethnic subgenre of American
literature. The thirteen essays in this volume engage works
of prose and poetry as aesthetic articulations of the fluid
transnational identities formed by Asian American writers
who move within and across national boundaries. With its
emphasis on the transmigratory and flexible nature of Asian
American literary production, the collection argues for
an equally balanced mode of criticism that extends our readings
of these works beyond the traditional limits of the American
literary canon. Individual chapters feature such writers
as Chang-rae Lee, Karen Tei Yamashita, Jhumpa Lahiri, Maxine
Hong Kingston, and Ha Jin, with attention to such discourses
as gender, space and mobility, transnationalism, identity,
genre, and post-coloniality. |
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 Sister
Swing
By Shirley Geok-lin Lim
paper 9812612270 $12.00
Buy
This Book!
Karen Yamashita,
author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
"... [set] against [a] wild cultural backdrop...
the story unfolds to reveal the strong and intimate ties
and responsibilities of sisterhood."
Shawn Wong, author
of American Knees
"... a richly textured understanding of a family
rooted in a rigid patriarchy ... and their new identity
molded in [1980s'] America."
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Richard
Lim, The Straits Times
"As in her first novel "Joss and Gold",
Shirley... has infused the work with her poetic sensibility.
A compelling read."
Book Description
"Sister Swing" chronicles the growing up years
of three sisters. It follows their transplant from a relatively
sheltered life in Malaysia to the raw realities of the
United States. It illuminates the complex relationships
between the sisters, and gently but firmly explores the
morals, values and mindsets of growing up Asian in a Western
world. |
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