Transpacific Imaginations by Yunte Huang

Transpacific Imaginations by Yunte Huang

Transpacific Imaginations is a study of how American literature is enmeshed with the literatures of Asia. The book begins with Western encounters with the Pacific: Yunte Huang reads Moby Dick as a Pacific work, looks at Henry Adams’s not talking about his travels in Japan and the Pacific basin in his autobiography, and compares Mark Twain to Liang Qichao. Huang then turns to Asian American encounters with the Pacific, concentrating on the "Angel Island" poems and on works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Araki Yasusada. Huang’s argument that the Pacific forms American literature more than is generally acknowledged is a major contribution to our understanding of literary history. The book is in dialogue with cross-cultural studies of the Pacific and with contemporary innovative poetics. Huang has found a vehicle to join Asians and Westerners at the deepest level, and that vehicle is poetry. Poets can best imagine an ethical ground upon which different people join hands. Huang asks us to contribute to this effort by understanding the poets and writers already in the process of linking diverse peoples.

This is a splendid, sharp, and trenchantly coherent study that will make an important intervention into American cultural studies, trans-Pacific Asia studies, and ethnic minority studies in ways that will alter how we now understand global and local dimensions of the American nation and Asia area-based disciplinary formationsHuang writes with disciplinary range and critical lucidity as well as an elegance of theoretical formulation that cannot be denied. Exploring a range of unexpected topics from Captain Ahab’s collections to Angel Island poems to the faux-Hiroshima dossier of Yasusada, Transpacific Imaginations is an outstanding work in all respects. -- Rob Wilson, author of Reimagining the American Pacific and American Sublime
Transpacific Imaginations is an extraordinary study. It’s hard to recall another book that covers a wider and more uneven discursive terrain than this one. The best way to describe the manuscript, perhaps, is to appropriate one of its own central metaphors: collection. This is a wonderful addition to the emerging field of transpacific studies. -- Wen Jin, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Huang’s book breaks new ground. Its desire to highlight the Pacific and its argument that the Pacific forms American literature more than is often acknowledged is both unusual and crucial and convincing. It covers old territory in news ways, and it brings attention to newish territory. Transpacific Imaginations will be a valuable asset to those interested in Pacific studies, Asian-American literature, and poetics. -- Juliana Spahr, author of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems
From the wake of a great white whale to the flatness of internment camp conversation, from commercial inventories to contemporary lyrics haunted by inauthenticity, Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Imaginations shows that ocean to be a criss-crossing field of inscriptions. Reading them together, in their intersection, is his task here. It is a book not easily put back in its bottle. -- Haun Saussy, Yale University

Yunte Huang is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Transpacific Displacement.

SKU	Nicht verfügbar
ISBN 13	9780674026377
ISBN 10	0674026373
Titel	Transpacific Imaginations
Autor	Yunte Huang
Buchzustand	Nicht verfügbar
Verlag	Harvard University Press
Erscheinungsjahr	2008-02-01
Seitenanzahl	202
Hinweis auf dem Einband	Die Abbildung des Buches dient nur Illustrationszwecken, die tatsächliche Bindung, das Cover und die Auflage können sich davon unterscheiden.
Hinweis	Nicht verfügbar