Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American LiteratureYunte 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. |
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aesthetic Amy Lowell annotation Anthology anthropology argue Asian American Asian American literature Beinecke Boasian called canon Cathay century chapter Charlie Chan Charlie’s China Chinese characters Chinese language Chinese Mirror Chinese poetry Chinese Written Chow contemporary Chinese poetry context critics cultural meanings Dao’s discourse East English Ernest Fenollosa essay ethnographic Ezra Pound Fenol Florence Ayscough Frobenius Greenblatt guage ideograph ideological Imagism Imagism’s Imagistic interpretation intertextual intertextual travel Japan Japanese John Yau Kingston’s Lin’s linguistic literary Lowell’s Marjorie Perloff Medium for Poetry migration modern Mulan myths narrative nese Notebook Oriental original Other’s Percival Lowell Perloff pidgin poem poetic poets political positivistic practice racist reader reading reality Ricoeur scholars sentence story study of Chinese textual thematic tion trans translation translator’s transpacific displacement travelogues University Press ventriloquism verb visual Western Woman Warrior words writing Written Character York Yue Fei