Transpacific Cartographies

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Author :
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 1978829353
Total Pages : 137 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (788 download)

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Book Synopsis Transpacific Cartographies by : Melody Yunzi Li

Download or read book Transpacific Cartographies written by Melody Yunzi Li and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transpacific Cartographies examines how contemporary Chinese diasporic narratives address the existential loss of home for immigrant communities at a time of global precarity and amid rising Sino-US tensions. Focusing on cultural productions of the Chinese diaspora from the 1990s to the present -- including novels by the Sinophone writers Yan Geling (The Criminal Lu Yanshi), Shi Yu (New York Lover), Chen Qian (Listen to the Caged Bird Sing), and Rong Rong (Notes of a Couple), as well as by the Anglophone writer Ha Jin (A Free Life; A Map of Betrayal), selected TV shows (Beijinger in New York; The Way We Were), and online literature -- Melody Yunzi Li argues that the characters in these stories create multilayered maps that transcend the territorial boundaries that make finding a home in a foreign land a seemingly impossible task. In doing so, these “maps” outline a transpacific landscape that reflects the psycho-geography of homemaking for diasporic communities. Intersecting with and bridging Sinophone studies, Chinese American studies, and diaspora studies and drawing on theories of literary cartography, Transpacific Cartographies demonstrates how these “maps” offer their readers different paths for finding a sense of home no matter where they are.

Transpacific Cartographies

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Author :
Publisher : Asian American Studies Today
ISBN 13 : 9781978829343
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (293 download)

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Book Synopsis Transpacific Cartographies by : Melody Yunzi Li

Download or read book Transpacific Cartographies written by Melody Yunzi Li and published by Asian American Studies Today. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transpacific Cartographies examines how contemporary Chinese diasporic narratives address the existential loss of home for immigrant communities at a time of global precarity and amid rising Sino-US tensions. Focusing on cultural productions of the Chinese diaspora from the 1990s to the present -- including novels by Sinophone writers Yan Geling (The Criminal Lu Yanshi), Shi Yu (New York Lover), Chen Qian (Listen to the Caged Bird Sing), and Rong Rong (Notes of a Couple), as well as by an Anglophone writer Ha Jin (A Free Life; A Map of Betrayal), selected TV shows (Beijinger in New York), and online literature -- Melody Yunzi Li argues that the characters in these stories create multilayered maps that transcend the territorial boundaries that make finding a home in foreign land a seemingly impossible task. In doing so, these "maps" outline a transpacific landscape that reflects the psycho-geography of homemaking for diasporic communities. Intersecting with and bridging Sinophone studies, Chinese American studies, and diaspora studies, and drawing on theories of literary cartography, Transpacific Cartographies demonstrates how these "maps" offer their readers different paths for finding a sense of home no matter where they are.

Moving Islands

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Publisher : University of Michigan Press
ISBN 13 : 0472128604
Total Pages : 359 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (721 download)

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Book Synopsis Moving Islands by : Diana Looser

Download or read book Moving Islands written by Diana Looser and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving Islands reveals the international and intercultural connections within contemporary performance from Oceania, focusing on theater, performance art, art installations, dance, film, and activist performance in sites throughout Oceania and in Australia, Asia, North America, and Europe. Diana Looser’s study moves beyond a predictable country-specific or island-specific focus to encompass an entire region defined by diversity and global exchange, showing how performance operates to frame social, artistic, and political relationships across widely dispersed locations. The study also demonstrates how Oceanian performance contributes to international debates about diaspora, indigeneity, urbanization, and environmental sustainability. The author considers the region’s unique cultural and geographic dynamics as she brings forth the paradigm of transpasifika to suggest a way of understanding these intercultural exchanges and connections, with the aim to “rework the cartographic and disciplinary priorities of transpacific studies to privilege the activities of Islander peoples.”

LatinAsian Cartographies

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Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 081358986X
Total Pages : 303 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (135 download)

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Book Synopsis LatinAsian Cartographies by : Susan Thananopavarn

Download or read book LatinAsian Cartographies written by Susan Thananopavarn and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-19 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LatinAsian Cartographies examines how Latina/o and Asian American writers provide important counter-narratives to the stories of racial encroachment that have come to characterize twenty-first century dominant discourses on race. Susan Thananopavarn contends that the Asian American and Latina/o presence in the United States, although often considered marginal in discourses of American history and nationhood, is in fact crucial to understanding how national identity has been constructed historically and continues to be constructed in the present day. Thananopavarn creates a new “LatinAsian” view of the United States that emphasizes previously suppressed aspects of national history, including imperialism, domestic racism during World War II, Cold War operations in Latin America and Asia, and the politics of borders in an age of globalization. LatinAsian Cartographies ultimately reimagines national narratives in a way that transforms dominant ideas of what it means to be American.

Transpacific Femininities

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Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822353164
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Transpacific Femininities by : Denise Cruz

Download or read book Transpacific Femininities written by Denise Cruz and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-19 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVFocusing on the early to mid-twentieth century, Denise Cruz illuminates the role that a growing English-language Philippine print culture played in the emergence of new classes of transpacific women./div

Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 303110157X
Total Pages : 181 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (311 download)

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Book Synopsis Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora by : Melody Yunzi Li

Download or read book Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora written by Melody Yunzi Li and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-21 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In various ways, Chinese diasporic communities seek to connect and re-connect with their “homelands” in literature, film, and visual culture. The essays in Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora examine how diasporic bodies and emotions interact with space and place, as well as how theories of affect change our thinking of diaspora. Questions of borders and border-crossing, not to mention the public and private spheres, in diaspora literature and film raise further questions about mapping and spatial representation and the affective and geographical significance of the push-and-pull movement in diasporic communities. The unique experience is represented differently by different authors across texts and media. In an age of globalization, in “the Chinese Century,” the spatial representation and cultural experiences of mobility, displacement, settlement, and hybridity become all the more urgent. The essays in this volume respond to this urgency, and they help to frame the study of Chinese diaspora and culture today.

Early American Cartographies

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Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 0807838721
Total Pages : 504 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Early American Cartographies by : Martin Brückner

Download or read book Early American Cartographies written by Martin Brückner and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maps were at the heart of cultural life in the Americas from before colonization to the formation of modern nation-states. The fourteen essays in Early American Cartographies examine indigenous and European peoples' creation and use of maps to better represent and understand the world they inhabited. Drawing from both current historical interpretations and new interdisciplinary perspectives, this collection provides diverse approaches to understanding the multilayered exchanges that went into creating cartographic knowledge in and about the Americas. In the introduction, editor Martin Bruckner provides a critical assessment of the concept of cartography and of the historiography of maps. The individual essays, then, range widely over space and place, from the imperial reach of Iberian and British cartography to indigenous conceptualizations, including "dirty," ephemeral maps and star charts, to demonstrate that pre-nineteenth-century American cartography was at once a multiform and multicultural affair. This volume not only highlights the collaborative genesis of cartographic knowledge about the early Americas; the essays also bring to light original archives and innovative methodologies for investigating spatial relations among peoples in the western hemisphere. Taken together, the authors reveal the roles of early American cartographies in shaping popular notions of national space, informing visual perception, animating literary imagination, and structuring the political history of Anglo- and Ibero-America. The contributors are: Martin Bruckner, University of Delaware Michael J. Drexler, Bucknell University Matthew H. Edney, University of Southern Maine Jess Edwards, Manchester Metropolitan University Junia Ferreira Furtado, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil William Gustav Gartner, University of Wisconsin–Madison Gavin Hollis, Hunter College of the City University of New York Scott Lehman, independent scholar Ken MacMillan, University of Calgary Barbara E. Mundy, Fordham University Andrew Newman, Stony Brook University Ricardo Padron, University of Virginia Judith Ridner, Mississippi State University

A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism

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Author :
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3031437667
Total Pages : 207 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (314 download)

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Book Synopsis A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism by : Keun-joo Christine Pae

Download or read book A Transpacific Imagination of Theology, Ethics, and Spiritual Activism written by Keun-joo Christine Pae and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-25 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite prolific feminist voices in Christian ethics, transnational perspectives are still underdeveloped. Similarly, ‘secular’ transnational feminist scholarship often overlooks religious faith, rituals, and spirituality, crucial to many women’s liberation movements across the globe. This book aims to fill these gaps in Christian and secular feminist scholarships by constructing a transnational feminist theo-ethics. Furthermore, by bringing the theological and the transnational together, the book offers an alternative tool in analyzing social identities beyond intersectionality (i.e., interstitial approach and interstitial integrity) and thus, renews feminist theological understandings, especially of time, memories, and healing beyond linear approaches. A renewed analytical tool would help the readers critically reinterrogate the global power structure buttressed by empire, militarized capitalism, and heteropatriarchal religious ideologies at the cost of raced, sexed, and classed bodies. At the same time, the book would create space where readers create and recreate theo-ethical visions for global peace and justice constructed upon transnational feminist praxis of solidarity and spiritual activism. Case studies offer concrete sites to inform readers about how to use transnational feminist theories at a micro- and macropolitical levels, and produce transnational feminist knowledge of God, spiritual activism, and solidarity. This book is written for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in religion, gender studies, and Asian/American studies to critically engage in the political, the theological, and the spiritual from transnational perspectives not as observers but as active participants in global politics.

Transitive Cultures

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Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813591899
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (135 download)

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Book Synopsis Transitive Cultures by : Christopher B. Patterson

Download or read book Transitive Cultures written by Christopher B. Patterson and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texts written by Southeast Asian migrants have often been read, taught, and studied under the label of multicultural literature. But what if the ideology of multiculturalism—with its emphasis on authenticity and identifiable cultural difference—is precisely what this literature resists? Transitive Cultures offers a new perspective on transpacific Anglophone literature, revealing how these chameleonic writers enact a variety of hybrid, transnational identities and intimacies. Examining literature from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, as well as from Southeast Asian migrants in Canada, Hawaii, and the U.S. mainland, this book considers how these authors use English strategically, as a means for building interethnic alliances and critiquing ruling power structures in both Southeast Asia and North America. Uncovering a wealth of texts from queer migrants, those who resist ethnic stereotypes, and those who feel few ties to their ostensible homelands, Transitive Cultures challenges conventional expectations regarding diaspora and minority writers.

Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections

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Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 3030557731
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (35 download)

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Book Synopsis Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections by : Jie Lu

Download or read book Transpacific Literary and Cultural Connections written by Jie Lu and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-11 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This critical interdisciplinary volume investigates modern and contemporary Asian cultural products in the non-westernized transpacific context of Asian and Latin American intellectual and cultural connections. It focuses on the Latin American intellectual, literary, and cultural influences on Asia, which have long been overshadowed by the dominance of Europe/North America-oriented discourse and by the predominance of academic research by both Asian and western intellectuals that focuses only on the West. Moving beyond the western intellectual paradigm, the volume examines how Asian literature, films, and art interact with Latin American literature and ideas to reexamine, reconsider, and re-explore issues related to the two regions' historical traumas, cultural identities, indigenous/vernacular traditions, and peripheral global-ness. The volume argues that Asian and Latin American literary and cultural endeavors are part of these regions' broader efforts to search for the forms of modernity that best fit their unique sociohistorical and sociocultural conditions.

Hawai'i Is My Haven

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Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478021667
Total Pages : 204 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Hawai'i Is My Haven by : Nitasha Tamar Sharma

Download or read book Hawai'i Is My Haven written by Nitasha Tamar Sharma and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-02 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hawaiʻi Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged antiBlack racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one-drop rule, nonWhite multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma's analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”

The Early Cartography of the Pacific

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (959 download)

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Book Synopsis The Early Cartography of the Pacific by : Lawrence Counselman Wroth

Download or read book The Early Cartography of the Pacific written by Lawrence Counselman Wroth and published by . This book was released on 1963 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Transpacific Studies

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Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824847741
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Transpacific Studies by : Janet Alison Hoskins

Download or read book Transpacific Studies written by Janet Alison Hoskins and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2014-08-31 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pacific has long been a space of conquest, exploration, fantasy, and resistance. Pacific Islanders had established civilizations and cultures of travel well before European explorers arrived, initiating centuries of upheaval and transformation. The twentieth century, with its various wars fought in and over the Pacific, is only the most recent era to witness military strife and economic competition. While “Asia Pacific” and “Pacific Rim” were late twentieth-century terms that dealt with the importance of the Pacific to the economic, political, and cultural arrangements that span Asia and the Americas, a new term has arisen—the transpacific. In the twenty-first century, U.S. efforts to dominate the ocean are symbolized not only in the “Pacific pivot” of American policy but also the development of a Transpacific Partnership. This partnership brings together a dozen countries—not including China—in a trade pact whose aim is to cement U.S. influence. That pact signals how the transpacific, up to now an academic term, has reached mass consciousness. Recognizing the increasing importance of the transpacific as a word and concept, this anthology proposes a framework for transpacific studies that examines the flows of culture, capital, ideas, and labor across the Pacific. These flows involve Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands. The introduction to the anthology by its editors, Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen, consider the advantages and limitations of models found in Asian studies, American studies, and Asian American studies for dealing with these flows. The editors argue that transpacific studies can draw from all three in order to provide a critical model for considering the geopolitical struggle over the Pacific, with its attendant possibilities for inequality and exploitation. Transpacific studies also sheds light on the cultural and political movements, artistic works, and ideas that have arisen to contest state, corporate, and military ambitions. In sum, the transpacific as a concept illuminates how flows across the Pacific can be harnessed for purposes of both domination and resistance. The anthology’s contributors include geographers (Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Weiqiang Lin), sociologists (Yen Le Espiritu, Hung Cam Thai), literary critics (John Carlos Rowe, J. Francisco Benitez, Yunte Huang, Viet Thanh Nguyen), and anthropologists (Xiang Biao, Heonik Kwon, Nancy Lutkehaus, Janet Hoskins), as well as a historian (Laurie J. Sears), and a film scholar (Akira Lippit). Together these contributors demonstrate how a transpacific model can be deployed across multiple disciplines and from varied locations, with scholars working from the United States, Singapore, Japan and England. Topics include the Cold War, the Chinese state, U.S. imperialism, diasporic and refugee cultures and economies, national cinemas, transpacific art, and the view of the transpacific from Asia. These varied topics are a result of the anthology’s purpose in bringing scholars into conversation and illuminating how location influences the perception of the transpacific. But regardless of the individual view, what the essays gathered here collectively demonstrate is the energy, excitement, and insight that can be generated from within a transpacific framework.

New Regional Geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317388046
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (173 download)

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Book Synopsis New Regional Geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific by : Priya Chacko

Download or read book New Regional Geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific written by Priya Chacko and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last twenty years, burgeoning transnational trade, investment and production linkages have emerged in the area between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The appearance of this area of interdependence and interaction and its potential impact on global order has captured the attention of political leaders, and the concept of the Indo-Pacific region is increasingly appearing in international political discourse. This book explores the emergence of the Indo-Pacific concept in different national settings. Chapters engage with critical theories of international relations, regionalism, geopolitics and geoeconomics in reflecting on the domestic and international drivers and foreign policy debates around the Indo-Pacific concept in Australia, India, the United States, Indonesia and Japan. They evaluate the reasons why the concept of the Indo-Pacific has captured the imaginations of policy makers and policy analysts in these countries and assess the implications of competing interpretations of the Indo-Pacific for conflict and cooperation in the region. A significant contribution to the analysis of the emerging geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific, this book will be of interest to researchers in the field of Asian Studies, International Relations, Regionalism, Foreign Policy Analysis and Geopolitics.

Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age, 1522-1657

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134759592
Total Pages : 280 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (347 download)

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Book Synopsis Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age, 1522-1657 by : Christina H. Lee

Download or read book Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age, 1522-1657 written by Christina H. Lee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-17 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing to bear the latest developments across various areas of research and disciplines, this collection provides a broad perspective on how Western Europe made sense of a complex, multi-faceted, and by and large Sino-centered East and Southeast Asia. The volume covers the transpacific period--after Magellan's opening of the transpacific route to the Far East and before the eventual dominance of the region by the British and the Dutch. In contrast to the period of the Enlightenment, during which Orientalist discourses arose, this initial period of encounters and conquest is characterized by an enormous curiosity and a desire to seize--not only materially but intellectually--the lands and peoples of East Asia. The essays investigate European visions of the Far East--particularly of China and Japan--and examine how and why particular representations of Asians and their cultural practices were constructed, revised, and adapted. Collectively, the essays show that images of the Far East were filtered by worldviews that ranged from being, on the one hand, universalistic and relatively equitable towards cultures to the other extreme, unilaterally Eurocentric.

Pacific Literatures as World Literature

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501389343
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Pacific Literatures as World Literature by : Hsinya Huang

Download or read book Pacific Literatures as World Literature written by Hsinya Huang and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-05-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pacific Literatures as World Literature is a conjuration of trans-Pacific poets and writers whose work enacts forces of “becoming oceanic” and suggests a different mode of understanding, viewing, and belonging to the world. The Pacific, past and present, remains uneasily amenable to territorial demarcations of national or marine sovereignty. At the same time, as a planetary element necessary to sustaining life and well-being, the Pacific could become the means to envisioning ecological solidarity, if compellingly framed in terms that elicit consent and inspire an imagination of co-belonging and care. The Pacific can signify a bioregional site of coalitional promise as much as a danger zone of antagonistic peril. With ground-breaking writings from authors based in North America, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hawaii, and Guam and new modes of research – including multispecies ethnography and practice, ecopoetics, and indigenous cosmopolitics – authors explore the socio-political significance of the Pacific and contribute to the development of a collective effort of comparative Pacific studies covering a refreshingly broad, ethnographically grounded range of research themes. This volume aims to decenter continental/land poetics as such via long-standing transnational Pacific ties, re-worlding Pacific literature as world literature.

Open World Empire

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Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 147988636X
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Open World Empire by : Christopher B. Patterson

Download or read book Open World Empire written by Christopher B. Patterson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, 2021 John Hope Franklin Prize, given by the American Studies Association Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play Video games vastly outpace all other mediums of entertainment in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products. Instead, they seem to reflect the open and uncontaminated reputation of information technology. Video games are undeniably imperial products. Their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already-existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before it, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today: the open world empire, formed through the routes of information technology and the violences of drone combat, unending war, and overseas massacres that occur with little scandal or protest. Though often presented as purely technological feats, video games are also artistic projects, and as such, they allow us an understanding of how war and imperial violence proceed under signs of openness, transparency, and digital utopia. But the video game, as Christopher B. Patterson argues, is also an inherently Asian commodity: its hardware is assembled in Asia; its most talented e-sports players are of Asian origin; Nintendo, Sony, and Sega have defined and dominated the genre. Games draw on established discourses of Asia to provide an “Asiatic” space, a playful sphere of racial otherness that straddles notions of the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic. Thinking through games like Overwatch, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Shenmue II, and Alien: Isolation, Patterson reads against empire by playing games erotically, as players do—seeing games as Asiatic playthings that afford new passions, pleasures, desires, and attachments.