Where I have never been migration, melancholia, and memory in Asian American narratives of return
Migration, melancholia, and memory in Asian American narratives of return Asian American narratives of return
Patricia P. Chu
- xv, 255 Seiten 23 cm
- Asian American history and culture .
Includes bibliographical references and (pages 231-245) and index
Introduction -- "Ears Attuned to Two Cultures": Reconciling Accounts in Cultural Curiosity -- Transpacific Echos in the Family Memoir: Sojourns and Returns in Lisa See's On Gold Mountain -- "The One Who Mediates": Mimicry, Melancholia, and Countermemory in The Concubine's Children -- Working Through Diasporic Melancholia: Winberg and May-lee Chai's The Girl From Purple Mountain -- "A Being...from a Different World": Yung Wing and the Making of a Global Subjectivity -- "To Bring the Dead to Life": Countermemories in Minatoya's Stangeness of Beauty and Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being -- Coda.
"This manuscript looks at migration, melancholia, and memory in what the author calls "Asian American narratives of return," or fiction and nonfiction narratives in which the narrator visits the ancestral homeland in Asia"-- "In researching accounts of diasporic Chinese offspring who returned to their parents' ancestral country, author Patricia Chu learned that she was not alone in the experience of growing up in America with an abstract affinity to an ancestral homeland and community. The bittersweet emotions she had are shared in Asian American literature that depicts migration-related melancholia, contests official histories, and portrays Asian American families as flexible and transpacific. Where I Have Never Been explores the tropes of return, tracing both literal return visits by Asian emigrants and symbolic "returns": first visits by diasporic offspring. Chu argues that these Asian American narratives seek to remedy widely held anxieties about cultural loss and the erasure of personal and family histories from public memory. In fiction, memoirs, and personal essays, the writers of return narratives--including novelists Lisa See, May-lee Chai, Lydia Minatoya, and Ruth Ozeki, and best-selling author Denise Chong, diplomat Yung Wing, scholar Winberg Chai, essayist Josephine Khu, and many others--register and respond to personal and family losses through acts of remembrance and countermemory"--
9781439902264 paper 9781439902257 hardback
2018021245
American literature--Asian American authors--History and criticism Asian Americans in literature American literature--History and criticism--20th century American literature--History and criticism--21st century Emigration and immigration in literature Homeland in literature Return in literature Melancholy in literature Memory in literature Asian Americans--Ethnic identity