Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780520232235)

Yunte 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.

Author: Yunte Huang
ISBN-10: 0520232232
ISBN-13: 9780520232235
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 02/06/2002
Pages: 224
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.77lbs
Size: 9.08h x 6.06w x 0.67d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2002 pg. 1960