Title: Immigrant subjectivities in Asian American and Asian diaspora literatures
First published: 1998
Description: This book opens with an interrogation of the representation of immigrants in Asian American and, to a lesser extent, Asian Diaspora literatures, including works by such writers as Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Amy Tan, and Bharati Mukherjee.

Immigrant subjectivities in these texts are frequently subsumed in the urgent need to self-fashion an Asian American identity, and take the peculiar form of "immigrant schizophrenic." Ma also explores how the drive to "claim America" manifests itself as an eroticization of white bodies in male immigrant and minority writers. He then directs his attention to immigrant self-representation from the unique yet representative positionality of Taiwanese immigrants, as found in overseas student literature and in the recent films of Ang Lee.

With a contrapuntal reading of the portrayal of immigrants in Asian American and Asian Diaspora literatures, this book maps out a terrain largely uncharted by scholars of various disciplines.
Subjects: Asian Americans in literature, Immigrants in literature, National characteristics, American, in literature, Intellectual life, History and criticism, American literature, Subjectivity in literature, Asian American authors, Emigration and immigration in literature, Asians, American literature, asian american authors, history and criticism, National characteristics in literature, LITERARY CRITICISM, American, Asian American
Places: Foreign countries
LC classification: PS153.A84 M3 1998