Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American LiteratureUniversity of California Press, 2002 M02 6 - 209 pages 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
Introduction | 1 |
An Ideographer or Ethnographer? | 60 |
The Intertextual Travel of Amy Lowell | 93 |
The Multifarious Faces of the Chinese Language | 113 |
Maxine Hong Kingston and the Making of | 138 |
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aesthetic American Writers Amy Lowell annotation Anthology anthropology argue Asian American Asian American literature Bei Dao Beinecke Boston California Press Cambridge canon Cathay century chapter Charlie Chan Chicago Press China Chinese characters Chinese language Chinese Mirror Chinese poetry Chow contemporary Chinese poetry context critics cultural meanings Dao's discourse Duke University Press East English Ernest Fenollosa essay ethnographic Ezra Pound Fa Mulan Fenol Florence Ayscough Frobenius Greenblatt guage Houghton Mifflin identity ideograph ideological Imagism Imagism's Imagists interpretation intertextual intertextual travel Japan Japanese John Yau Kingston's linguistic literary Lowell's Marjorie Perloff Maxine Hong Medium for Poetry migration modern Mulan myths narrative nese Notebook Oriental Percival Lowell Perloff pidgin poem poetic poets political racial racist reader reading reality Ricoeur scholars sentence story study of Chinese textual thematic tion trans translation transpacific displacement travelogues ventriloquism visual Western Woman Warrior words writing York