Transpacific displacement : ethnography, translation, and intertextual travel in twentieth-century American literature / Yunte Huang.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Huang, Yunte.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American literature.

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

Chinese literature--Appreciation--United States.

Chinese literature.

American literature--Chinese influences.

Chinese Americans--Intellectual life.

Chinese Americans.

Chinese Americans in mass media.

Chinese Americans in literature.

Immigrants in literature.

Ethnology in literature.

Intertextuality.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (226 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, c2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Yunte Huang takes a most original "ethnographic" approach to more and less well-known American texts as he traces what he calls the transpacific displacement of cultural meanings through twentieth-century America's imaging of Asia. Informed by the politics of linguistic appropriation and disappropriation, Transpacific Displacement opens with a radically new reading of Imagism through the work of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. Huang relates Imagism to earlier linguistic ethnographies of Asia and to racist representations of Asians in American pop culture, such as the book and movie character Charlie Chan, then shows that Asian American writers subject both literary Orientalism and racial stereotyping to double ventriloquism and countermockery. Going on to offer a provocative critique of some textually and culturally homogenizing tendencies exemplified in Maxine Hong Kingston's work and its reception, Huang ends with a study of American translations of contemporary Chinese poetry, which he views as new ethnographies that maintain linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Ethnographers-Out-There: Percival Lowell, Ernest Fenollosa, and Florence Ayscough

2. Ezra Pound: An Ideographer or Ethnographer?

3. The Intertextual Travel of Amy Lowell

4. The Multifarious Faces of the Chinese Language

5. Maxine Hong Kingston and the Making of an "American" Myth

6. Translation as Ethnography: Problems in American Translations of Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 189-201) and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN:

9786612355981

9780520928145

0520928148

9781282355989

1282355988

9781597349635

1597349631

OCLC:

475927106