Across Meridians

History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Transnational Novels

Jinqi Ling

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780804778015
• eBook ISBN: 9780804782043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Over the course of the last two decades, novelist Karen Tei Yamashita has reshaped the Asian American literary imagination in profound ways. In Across Meridians, Jinqi Ling offers readers the most critically engaged examination to date of Yamashita's literary corpus. Crafted at the intersection of intellectual history, ethnic studies, literary analysis, and critical theory, Ling's study goes beyond textual investigation to intervene in larger debates over postmodern representation, spatial materialism, historical form, and social and academic activism.

Arguing that Yamashita's most important contribution is her incorporation of a North-South vector into the East-West conceptual paradigm, Ling highlights the novelist's re-prioritization, through such a geographical realignment, of socio-economic concerns for Asian American literary criticism. In assessing Yamashita's works as such, Ling designates her novelistic art as a form of new Asian American literary avant-garde that operates from the peripheries of received histories, aesthetics, and disciplines. Seeking not only to demonstrate the importance of Yamashita's transnational art, Ling sets new terms for ongoing dialogues in Asian American literary and cultural criticism. At the same time, he argues for the continuing relevance of Asian American literature as a self-reflexive and self-renewable critical practice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Politics of Geography: Or, a Troping of Asian American Spatial Imagination
• 2. Southward Migration: Empire Building and Transculturation in Brazil- Maru
• 3. Subterranean Transnationality: Race, Affect, and Material Form in Circle K Cycles
• 4. Writing against Reification: cation: Temporality and Popular Genre in Through rough the Arc of the Rain Forest
• 5. Thinking Magic, Reinventing the Real: Consciousness and Decolonization in Tropic of Orange
• 6. Toward a Critical Internationalism: Nation, Revolt, and Performance for mance in I Hotel
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index