Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts. Racial Asymmetries specifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the author’s ethnoracial makeup does not directly overlap with that of the storytelling perspective. Through rigorous analysis of novels and short fiction, such as Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex, Sabina Murray’s A Carnivore’s Inquiry and Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind, Sohn reveals how the construction of narrative perspective allows the Asian American writer a flexible aesthetic canvas upon which to engage issues of oppression and inequity, power and subjectivity, and the complicated construction of racial identity. Speaking to concerns running through postcolonial studies and American literature at large, Racial Asymmetries employs an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds.
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Employs an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds.
Acknowledgments Introduction: The Many Storytellers of Asian American Fiction 1 White Flight, White Narration: Suburban Deviancies in Chang-rae Lee's Aloft 2 When the Minor Becomes Major: Asian American Literary California, Chicano Narration, and Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex 3 The Incomplete Biography in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Narrating Imagined Lives in Sigrid Nunez's Fictions 4 Comparative Colonial Narration: Conquest and Consumption in Sabina Murray's Fictions 5 Impossible Narration: Racial Analogies and Asian American Speculative Fictions Coda: Fiction Unbound Notes Works Cited IndexAbout the Author
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StephenSohnsRacial Asymmetriesprovides rich, nuanced readings of the performance, permutations, and persistence of race in 21st-century Asian American literature. In calling attention to the interplay between diverse Asian American texts and their conditions of emergence as such,Sohns analyses appreciate the cultural politics of difference that Asian American fictional worlds continue to critically express.
Les mer
Employs an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds.

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781479800070
Publisert
2014-01-17
Utgiver
Vendor
New York University Press
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
153 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
297

Forfatter

Biographical note

Stephen Hong Sohn is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University. He is the co-editor of Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits.