Double agency : acts of impersonation in Asian American literature and culture / Tina Chen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chen, Tina (Tina Yih-Ting), 1970-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--Asian American authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--Asian American authors.

Impostors and imposture in literature.

Stereotypes (Social psychology) in literature.

Asian Americans--Intellectual life.

Asian Americans.

Identity (Psychology) in literature.

Asian Americans in literature.

Group identity in literature.

Impersonation in literature.

Race in literature.

Physical Description:

xxvi, 245 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2005.

Summary:

In Double Agency, Tina Chen proposes impersonation as a paradigm for spying out the performative dimensions of Asian American literature and culture. Asian American acts of impersonation, Chen argues, simultaneously foreground the limits of subjectivity even as they insist upon the undeniable importance of subjecthood. By decoupling imposture from impersonation, Chen exposes how Asian American performances have often been misinterpreted, read as acts of betrayal rather than ones of multiple allegiance. A central paradox informing the book's conceptual frameworks-impersonation as a performance of divided allegiance that simultaneously pays homage to and challenges authenticity and authority-thus becomes a site for re-considering the implications of Asian Americans as double agents. In exploring the possibilities that impersonation affords for refusing the binary logics of loyalty/disloyalty, real/fake, and Asian/American, Double Agency attends to the possibilities of reading such acts as impersonations-dynamic performances, and a performance dynamics-through which Asian Americans constitute themselves as speaking and acting subjects.

Contents:

Impersonation and double agency : theorizing the practice, practicing the theory

Dissecting the "Devil Doctor" : stereotype and sensationalism in Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu

De/posing stereotype on the Asian American stage

Bodily negotiations : the politics of performance in Hualing Nieh's Mulberry and Peach

Shamanism and the subject(s) of history in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort woman

Impersonation and other disappearing acts : the double(d) agent of Chang-rae Lee's Native speaker.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [223]-240) and index.

ISBN:

0804751854

0804751862

OCLC:

57506738