Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings

Trauma, Precarity and War Memories in Asian American Writings
Author: Jade Tsui-yu Lee
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2020-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9811563632

Departing from Jacques Derrida’s appropriations of cinders as a trope of war atrocity aftermath, this book examines writings that deal with war trauma memories in Asian-American communities. Seeing war experiences and their associative diasporas and affects as the core and axis, it considers the multifarious poetics and politics of minority trauma writings, and posits a possible interpretive framework for contemporary Asian-American writings, including those written by Julie Otsuka, Joseph Craig Danner, Monique Truong, Nguyen Viet Thanh, Janice Lowe Shinebourne, and Andre Lamontagne. As these writings contain works regarding Japanese-American, Indo-Chinese Guyanese, Chinese Quebeçois, Vietnamese exiles/refugees, and Vietnam-American experiences, this book presents a broad cross-cultural view on migration and minority issues triggered by wars and precarious conditions, as the diversified experiences examined here epitomize an intricate historical intimacy across four continents: Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe.

Insidious Trauma in Eastern African Literatures and Cultures

Insidious Trauma in Eastern African Literatures and Cultures
Author: Norman Saadi Nikro
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2024-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 104008673X

This book investigates the thematic and conceptual dimensions of insidious trauma in contemporary eastern African literatures and cultural productions. The book extends our understanding of trauma beyond people’s immediate and conventional experiences of disastrous events and incidents, instead considering how trauma is sustained in the aftermaths, continuing to impact livelihoods, and familial, social, and gender relationships. Drawing on different circumstances and experiences across and between the eastern African region, the book explores how emerging cultural practices involve varying modes of narrating, representing, and thematising insidious trauma. In doing so, the book considers different forms and practices of cultural production, including fashion, social media, film, and literature, in order to uncover how human subjects and cultural artefacts circulate through modalities of social, cultural and political ecologies. Transdisciplinary in scope and showcasing the work of experts from across the region, this book will be an important guide for researchers across literature, media studies, sociology, and trauma studies.

Traumatic Pasts

Traumatic Pasts
Author: Mark S. Micale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2001-09-04
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0521583659

The essays in this book trace the origins of ongoing heated debates regarding trauma.

Rejection of Victimhood in Literature

Rejection of Victimhood in Literature
Author: Sean James Bosman
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2021-08-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004469001

This book examines how selected works of fiction advocate for just memories and promote identities that accept ethical agency and that exercise power and control over their own lives and destinies, no matter how limited such control may be.

Moon Brow

Moon Brow
Author: Shahriar Mandanipour
Publisher: Restless Books
Total Pages: 535
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1632061295

"Before he enlisted as a soldier in the Iran-Iraq war and disappeared, Amir Yamini was a carefree playboy whose only concerns were seducing women and riling his religious family. Five years later, his mother and sister Reyhaneh find him in a mental hospital for shell-shocked soldiers, his left arm and most of his memory lost. Amir is haunted by the vision of a mysterious woman whose face he cannot see-- the crescent moon on her forehead shines too brightly. He names her Moon Brow. Back home in Tehran, the prodigal son is both hailed as a living martyr to the cause of Ayatollah Khomeini's Revolution and confined as a dangerous madman. His sense of humor, if not his sanity, intact, Amir cajoles Reyhaneh into helping him escape the garden walls to search for Moon Brow. Piecing together the puzzle of his past, Amir decides theres only one solution: he must return to the battlefield and find the remains of his severed arm-- and discover its secrets"--Amazon.com.

Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996–2020: Volume 4

Asian American Literature in Transition, 1996–2020: Volume 4
Author: Betsy Huang
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2021-06-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108911293

This volume examines the concerns of Asian American literature from 1996 to the present. This period was not only marked by civil unrest, terror and militarization, economic depression, and environmental abuse, but also unprecedented growth and visibility of Asian American literature. This volume is divided into four sections that plots the trajectories of, and tensions between, social challenges and literary advances. Part One tracks how Asian American literary productions of this period reckon with the effects of structures and networks of violence. Part Two tracks modes of intimacy – desires, loves, close friendships, romances, sexual relations, erotic contacts – that emerge in the face of neoimperialism, neoliberalism, and necropolitics. Part Three traces the proliferation of genres in Asian American writing of the past quarter century in new and in well-worn terrains. Part Four surveys literary projects that speculate on future states of Asian America in domestic and global contexts.

The Refugees

The Refugees
Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2017-02-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802189350

“Beautiful and heartrending” fiction set in Vietnam and America from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker) In these powerful stories, written over a period of twenty years and set in both Vietnam and America, Viet Thanh Nguyen paints a vivid portrait of the experiences of people leading lives between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. This incisive collection by the National Book Award finalist and celebrated author of The Committed gives voice to the hopes and expectations of people making life-changing decisions to leave one country for another, and the rifts in identity, loyalties, romantic relationships, and family that accompany relocation. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her with a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half-sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will, the stories are a captivating testament to the dreams and hardships of migration. “Terrific.” —Chicago Tribune “An important and incisive book.” —The Washington Post “An urgent, wonderful collection.” —NPR

Letters to Memory

Letters to Memory
Author: Karen Tei Yamashita
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2017-09-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1566894980

Praise for Karen Tei Yamashita: "It's a stylistically wild ride, but it's smart, funny and entrancing." —NPR "Fluid and poetic as well as terrifying." —New York Times Book Review With delightful plays of voice and structure, this is literary fiction at an adventurous, experimental high point." —Kirkus "Magnificent. . . . Intriguing." —Library Journal "This powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Scintillations is an excursion through the Japanese internment using archival materials from the Yamashita family as well as a series of epistolary conversations with composite characters representing a range of academic specialties. Historians, anthropologists, classicists—their disciplines, and Yamashita's engagement with them, are a way for her explore various aspects of the internment and to expand its meaning beyond her family, and our borders, to ideas of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, Orientalism, and community. Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award.

Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror"

Trauma and Fictions of the
Author: Sarah O'Brien
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2021-05-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000386422

This book explores the ways in which transnational fiction in the post-9/11 era can intervene in discourse surrounding the "war on terror" to advocate for marginalised perspectives. Trauma and Fictions of the "War on Terror" conceptualises global political discourse about the "war on terror" as incongruous, with transnational memory frames instituted in Western nations centralising 9/11 as uniquely traumatic, excluding the historical and present-day experiences of Afghans under Western—specifically American—hegemonic violence. Recent developments in trauma studies explain how dominant Western trauma theory participates in this exclusion, failing to account for the ongoing suffering common to non-Western, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. O’Brien explores how Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), Nadeem Aslam (The Wasted Vigil, The Blind Man’s Garden), and Kamila Shamsie (Burnt Shadows) represent marginalised perspectives in the context of the "war on terror".

Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Censoring an Iranian Love Story
Author: Shahriar Mandanipour
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2009-05-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 030727196X

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • “One of Iran's most important living fiction writers” (The Guardian) shows what it’s like to live and love there today. "A haunting portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran." —The New York Times In a country where mere proximity between a man and a woman may be the prologue to deadly sin, where illicit passion is punished by imprisonment, or even death, telling that most redemptive of human narratives becomes the greatest literary challenge. If conducting a love affair in modern Iran is not a simple undertaking, then telling the story of that love may be even more difficult. Shahriar Mandanipour (author of Moon Brow) evokes a pair of young lovers who find each other—despite surreal persecution and repressive parents—through coded messages and internet chat rooms; and triumphantly their story entwines with an account of their creator’s struggle. Inventive, darkly comic and profoundly touching, Censoring an Iranian Love Story celebrates both the unquenchable power of the written word and a love that is doomed, glorious, and utterly real.