Alphabetically arranged entries in five chronological volumes focus on individual authors, works, and topics related to multiethnic American literature.
Alphabetically arranged entries in five chronological volumes focus on individual authors, works, and topics related to multiethnic American literature.
Alphabetically arranged entries in five chronological volumes focus on individual authors, works, and topics related to multiethnic American literature.
Asian American literature dates back to the close of the 19th century, and during the years following World War II it significantly expanded in volume and diversity. Monumental in scope, this encyclopedia surveys Asian American literature from its origins through 2007. Included are more than 270 alphabetically arranged entries on writers, major works, significant historical events, and important terms and concepts. Thus the encyclopedia gives special attention to the historical, social, cultural, and legal contexts surrounding Asian American literature and central to the Asian American experience. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and cites works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography of essential print and electronic resources. While literature students will value this encyclopedia as a guide to writings by Asian Americans, the encyclopedia also supports the social studies curriculum by helping students use literature to learn about Asian American history and culture, as it pertains to writers from a host of Asian ethnic and cultural backgrounds, including Afghans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Iranians, Indians, Vietnamese, Hawaiians, and other Asian Pacific Islanders. The encyclopedia supports the literature curriculum by helping students learn more about Asian American literature. In addition, it supports the social studies curriculum by helping students learn about the Asian American historical and cultural experience.
Racial passing has fascinated thousands of American readers since the end of the nineteenth century. However, the phenomenon of Jews passing as gentiles has been all but overlooked. This book examines forgotten novels depicting Jewish Americans masquerading as gentiles. Exploring two "waves" of publications of this subgenre—in the 1940s-1950s and 1990s-2000s—this book raises questions about the perceptions of Jewish difference during these periods.Looking at issues such as Whiteness, Americanness, gender, and race, it traces the changes in the representation of Jewish identity during the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Ohad Reznick’s Imagined Non-Jews is an important intervention in the scholarship on the literature of passing. This book also makes a significant contribution to Jewish American literary studies through thoughtful close readings of texts from the 1940s and 1950s, many of them little-known today, as well as multi-ethnic American fiction from the turn-of-the-21st-century, all of them featuring characters who conceal their Jewishness in order to pass for gentile. —Lori Harrison-Kahan, Boston College, author of The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary
The Korean War, often invoked in American culture as “the forgotten war,” remains ongoing. Though active fighting only occurred between 1950 and 1953, the signing of an armistice resulted in an infamous stalemate and the construction of the Korean Peninsula’s Demilitarized Zone. Minor Salvage reads early Korean American life writings in order to explore the admittedly partial ways in which those made precarious by war seek to rebuild their lives. The titular phrase “minor salvage,” draws on different valences of the word salvage which, while initially associated with naval recovery efforts, can also be used to describe the rescue of waste material. Spurred by the stories told and retold to him by his parents Soon Ho and Yunpyo, Sohn enacts minor salvage by reading overlooked early Korean American life writings penned by Induk Pahk, Taiwon Koh, Joseph Anthony, and Kim Yong-ik alongside a later generation of life writings authored by Sunny Che and K. Connie Kang. In the context of the Korean War, Sohn argues, life writings take on a crucial political orientation precisely because of the fragility attached to refugees, civilians, children, women, and divided family members. To depict the possibility of life is to acknowledge simultaneously the threat of death, violence, and brutality, and in this regard, such life writings are part of a longer genealogy in which marginalized communities find representational power through the creative process.
Even though there exist only a few general studies on the subject of Czechoslovak American women, this is not, at all, a reflection of the paucity of work done by these women, as this publication demonstrates. This monograph is a compendium of notable American women with Czechoslovak roots, who distinguished themselves in a particular field or area, from the time they first immigrated to America to date. Included are, not only individuals born on the territory of former Czechoslovakia, but also their descendants. This project has been approached strictly geographically, irrespective of the language or ethnicity. Because of the lack of bibliographical information, most of the monograph comprises biobibliographical information, in which area a plethora of information exists. As the reader will discover, these women have been involved, practically, in every field of human endeavor, in numbers that surprise. On the whole, they have been noted for their independent spirit and nonconforming role.
As pointed out in my last two publications, no comprehensive study has been undertaken about the American Learned Men and Women with Czechoslovak roots. The aim of this work is to correct this glaring deficiency, with the focus on immigration from the period of mass migration and beyond, irrespective whether they were born in their European ancestral homes or whether they have descended from them. Whereas in the two mentioned monographs, the emphasis has been on scholars and social and natural scientists; and men and women in medicine, applied sciences and engineering, respectively, the present compendium deals with notable Americans of Czechoslovak ancestry in arts and letters, and in education. With respect to women, although most professional fields were closed to them through much of the nineteenth century, the area of arts and letters was opened to them, as noted earlier and as this compendium authenticates.
In the past decades, children of immigrants have drawn increased attention not only in press and media, but also in a number of academic fields, among them sociology, history, or ethnology. Surprisingly, literary and cultural studies have been somewhat more reluctant to approach the topic. While there is work on individual authors or, at the very most, particular ethnic groups, comparative approaches are rare. This monograph aims to amend this. It provides an extensive discussion of US-American literature about children of immigrants, comparing different authors, different ethnic groups and different literary and historical contexts.