Irrawaddy Tango

Irrawaddy Tango
Author: Wendy Law-Yone
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Total Pages: 314
Release: 1993
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

"A pepper-tongued, tango-dancing Asian beauty rises from a village girlhood to become the wife of her country's dictator and then a leader of the rebel forces arrayed against him. She is the electric eponymous heroine of a novel that resonates with the fevers and tumults of our era, that opens with a captive lion's roar and moves halfway around the world and through our century - from the turbulent Asian country here called Daya to America and back, from the 1940s to the 1990s." "From our earliest glimpses of the edgy young girl in a busy, gossipy, close-knit river hamlet, we know we are in the presence of a star: energized, funny, dangerously savvy, and on the move from the day when a boy in her compound teaches her the dance that will name her and crucially affect her fate." "It is a fate that carries her, dazzled, to Daya's capital and the talent contest where her performance (in a sun-and-star-spangled dress) of the "Irrawaddy Tango" captures the obsessed attention of the tough, ambitious colonel, Supremo - an adventurer already on the threshold of power - whom, on a wild impulse, she marries. We see her swimming against the fierce currents of our time, maintaining her equally fierce integrity in the face of her dubious celebrity as consort to Daya's hated, absolute, yet precarious head of state, her capture by the Jesu guerrillas in the Punished Provinces, where she is first prisoner, then foot soldier, then a leader...her recapture, rescue, exile, and mysterious return." "Ten years after Wendy Law-Yone's greatly admired The Coffin Tree, she gives us a novel equally powerful - a novel that, like its heroine, shocks and moves us by its fire and color, by its fluctuation of emotional tone from harsh to tender, cruel to comic, to frighteningly quiet. An unfaltering evocation of lives lived on the rim of the volcano."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Irrawaddy Tango

Irrawaddy Tango
Author: Wendy Law-Yone
Publisher: Triquarterly Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2003
Genre: Asia
ISBN: 9780810151420

A novel of love, vengeance and political unrest in South East Asia, Irrawaddy Tango tells the unsettling tale of powerful men and powerless women. Evoking the harshness of exile, it reveals the misunderstandings between East and West and by doing so captures the intensity of living between the two.

The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature

The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature
Author: Rachel Lee
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 721
Release: 2014-06-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317698401

The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature offers a general introduction as well as a range of critical approaches to this important and expanding field. Divided into three sections, the volume: Introduces "keywords" connecting the theories, themes and methodologies distinctive to Asian American Literature Addresses historical periods, geographies and literary identities Looks at different genre, form and interdisciplinarity With 41 essays from scholars in the field this collection is a comprehensive guide to a significant area of literary study for students and teachers of Ethnic American, Asian diasporic and Pacific Islander Literature. Contributors: Christine Bacareza Balance, Victor Bascara, Leslie Bow, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Tina Chen, Anne Anlin Cheng, Mark Chiang, Patricia P. Chu, Robert Diaz, Pin-chia Feng, Tara Fickle, Donald Goellnicht, Helena Grice, Eric Hayot, Tamara C. Ho, Hsuan L. Hsu, Mark C. Jerng, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Daniel Y. Kim, Jodi Kim, James Kyung-Jin Lee, Rachel C. Lee, Jinqi Ling, Colleen Lye, Sean Metzger, Susette Min, Susan Y. Najita, Viet Thanh Nguyen, erin Khuê Ninh, Eve Oishi, Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Steven Salaita, Shu-mei Shi, Rajini Srikanth, Brian Kim Stefans, Erin Suzuki, Theresa Tensuan, Cynthia Tolentino, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Eleanor Ty, Traise Yamamoto, Timothy Yu.

Romancing Human Rights

Romancing Human Rights
Author: Tamara C. Ho
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2015-01-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 082485392X

When the world thinks of Burma, it is often in relation to Nobel laureate and icon Aung San Suu Kyi. But beyond her is another world, one that complicates the overdetermination of Burma as a pariah state and myths about the “high status” of Southeast Asian women. Highlighting and critiquing this fraught terrain, Tamara C. Ho’s Romancing Human Rights maps “Burmese women” as real and imagined figures across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. More than a recitation of “on the ground” facts, Ho’s groundbreaking scholarship—the first monograph to examine Anglophone literature and dynamics of gender and race in relation to Burma—brings a critical lens to contemporary literature, film, and politics through the use of an innovative feminist/queer methodology. She crosses intellectual boundaries to illustrate how literary and gender analysis can contribute to discourses surrounding and informing human rights—and in the process offers a new voice in the debates about representation, racialization, migration, and spirituality. Romancing Human Rights demonstrates how Burmese women break out of prisons, both real and discursive, by writing themselves into being. Ho assembles an eclectic archive that includes George Orwell, Aung San Suu Kyi, critically acclaimed authors Ma Ma Lay and Wendy Law-Yone, and activist Zoya Phan. Her close readings of literature and politicized performances by women in Burma, the Burmese diaspora, and the United States illuminate their contributions as authors, cultural mediators, and practitioner-citizens. Using flexible, polyglot rhetorical tactics and embodied performances, these authors creatively articulate alter/native epistemologies—regionally situated knowledges and decolonizing viewpoints that interrogate and destabilize competing transnational hegemonies, such as U.S. moral imperialism and Asian militarized dictatorship. Weaving together the fictional and non-fictional, Ho’s gendered analysis makes Romancing Human Rights a unique cultural studies project that bridges postcolonial studies, area studies, and critical race/ethnic studies—a must-read for those with an interest in fields of literature, Asian and Asian American studies, history, politics, religion, and women’s and gender studies.

Feminist Reflections on Growth and Transformation

Feminist Reflections on Growth and Transformation
Author: Debra M. Kawahara
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1135804567

Understanding multicultural feminist perspectives is vital for clinicians working to effectively help women in therapy. Feminist Reflections on Growth and Transformation: Asian American Women in Therapy provides therapists with valuable insight and research into the identities of Asian and Asian American women, all toward the crucial goal of being more effective when providing therapeutic help. In-depth explorations into the women’s personal experiences and psychological issues provide an empowering multicultural feminist viewpoint that challenges assumptions and stereotypes about their identities while presenting innovative therapeutic approaches. Identity is made up from several factors, such as worldview, beliefs, values, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, age, and religious orientation. Feminist Reflections on Growth and Transformation: Asian American Women in Therapy explores how these common factors impact psychotherapy approaches for women of Asian American backgrounds. This unique text presents the current research, what the data mean for adjusting clinical strategies, and personal accounts from Asian and Asian American women. Each chapter is extensively referenced. Topics in Feminist Reflections on Growth and Transformation: Asian American Women in Therapy include: breaking free of the passive, subservient stereotypes defining gender identity cultural and identity issues emotional parity negotiations in Chinese immigrant women’s marital relationships suicide as a means of agency rather than simply a cry for help the use of feminist and multicultural principles with survivors of domestic violence research on Asian American lesbians’ health integrating multiculturalism and feminism in the treatment of eating disorders innovative therapeutic approach based on Hindu understandings of Shakti approaches to work on body image and eating disorders group counseling with Asian American women training multicultural feminist therapy practitioners Feminist Reflections on Growth and Transformation: Asian American Women in Therapy is an insightful exploration of the culturally sensitive knowledge and skills clinicians need to work more effectively with female clients of Asian ancestry. This stimulating work is important reading for therapists, counselors, psychologists, and others in the mental health and social work fields.

Asian-American Writers

Asian-American Writers
Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2009
Genre: American literature
ISBN: 1604134011

Presents critical perspectives on the works of Asian-American writers, including Gish Jen, Cheng-rae Lee, and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater

Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater
Author: Wenying Xu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2022-08-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1538157322

A Library Journal Best Reference Book of 2022 This book represents the culmination of over 150 years of literary achievement by the most diverse ethnic group in the United States. Diverse because this group of ethnic Americans includes those whose ancestral roots branch out to East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Western Asia. Even within each of these regions, there exist vast differences in languages, cultures, religions, political systems, and colonial histories. From the earliest publication in 1887 to the latest in 2021, this dictionary celebrates the incredibly rich body of fiction, poetry, memoirs, plays, and children’s literature. Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries on genres, major terms, and authors. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this topic.

Words Matter

Words Matter
Author: King-Kok Cheung
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2000-02-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0824865642

In this age of rapid transition, Asian American studies and American studies in general are being reconfigured to reflect global migrations and the diverse populations of the United States. Asian American literature, in particular, has embodied the crisis of identity that is at the heart of larger academic and political debates surrounding diversity and the inclusion and exclusion of immigrant and refugee groups. These issues underlie the very principles on which literature, culture, and art are produced, preserved, taught, and critiqued. Words Matter is the first collection of interviews with 20th-century Asian American writers. The conversations that have been gathered here—interviews with twenty writers possessing unique backgrounds, perspectives, thematic concerns, and artistic priorities—effectively dispel any easy categorizations of people of Asian descent. These writers comment on their own work and speak frankly about aesthetics, politics, and the challenges they have encountered in pursuing a writing career. They address, among other issues, the expectations attached to the label "Asian American," the burden of representation shouldered by ethnic artists, and the different demands of "mainstream" and ethnic audiences.

Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion

Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion
Author: Leslie Bow
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2011-10-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1400824141

Asian American women have long dealt with charges of betrayal within and beyond their communities. Images of their "disloyalty" pervade American culture, from the daughter who is branded a traitor to family for adopting American ways, to the war bride who immigrates in defiance of her countrymen, to a figure such as Yoko Ono, accused of breaking up the Beatles with her "seduction" of John Lennon. Leslie Bow here explores how representations of females transgressing the social order play out in literature by Asian American women. Questions of ethnic belonging, sexuality, identification, and political allegiance are among the issues raised by such writers as Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Bharati Mukherjee, Jade Snow Wong, Amy Tan, Sky Lee, Le Ly Hayslip, Wendy Law-Yone, Fiona Cheong, and Nellie Wong. Beginning with the notion that feminist and Asian American identity are mutually exclusive, Bow analyzes how women serve as boundary markers between ethnic or national collectives in order to reveal the male-based nature of social cohesion. In exploring the relationship between femininity and citizenship, liberal feminism and American racial discourse, and women's domestic abuse and human rights, the author suggests that Asian American women not only mediate sexuality's construction as a determiner of loyalty but also manipulate that construction as a tool of political persuasion in their writing. The language of betrayal, she argues, offers a potent rhetorical means of signaling how belonging is policed by individuals and by the state. Bow's bold analysis exposes the stakes behind maintaining ethnic, feminist, and national alliances, particularly for women who claim multiple loyalties.

Land of Smiles

Land of Smiles
Author: A Maytree
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2008-02-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780595912766

Before Bush and Iraq, there was Nixon and Vietnam. It's 1969. The Vietnam War has turned into a meat grinder, 250,000 protesters are marching on Washington to confront a defiant President Nixon holed up in the White House, and Alden Maytree, fresh out of Catholic seminary, has passed his pre-induction physical. Just before Uncle Sam drafts him, he gets a surprise call. Instead of killing commies in Vietnam, how about spending two years next door in exotic Thailand, the "Land of Smiles," as a Peace Corps Volunteer? But when he arrives in Bangkok, he discovers he can't escape the war and clashes with Peace Corps, the U.S. Embassy and the CIA. Land of Smiles is a memoir of one young man's coming of age during the Boomer generation's war-and the painful lessons he and America both learn as they try to save the world.