Articulate silences : Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Articulate silences : Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa
(Reading women writing / a series edited by Shari Benstock and Celeste Schenck)
Cornell University Press, 1993
- : cloth
- : pbk
Available at 37 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliography (p. [173]-188) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this pathbreaking book, King-Kok Cheung sheds new light on the thematic and rhetoncal uses of silence in fiction by three Asian American women: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and JoyKogawa. Boldly articulating the unspeakable, these writers break the silence imposed by families or ethnic communities and defy the dominant culture that suppresses the voicing of minority experiences. Yet at the same time, they demonstrate how silences-voiceless gestures, textual ellipses, authorial hesitations-can themselves be articulate. Drawing on theoretical works on women's writing, on ethnicity and race, and on postmodernism and history, Cheung takes issue with Anglo-American feminists who valorize speech unequivocally and with revisionist Asian American male critics who attempt to refute Orientalist stereotypes by renouncing silence. She challenges Eurocentric views of speech and silence as polarized, hierarchical, and gendered, and proposes an approach to Asian American literature which overturns the "East-West" or "dual personality" model. Yamamoto, Kingston, and Kogawa interweave speech and silence, narration and ellipses, autobiography and fiction as they adapt and recast Asian and Euro-American precursors. Drawing freely from both traditions, they reinvent the past by decentering, disseminating, and interrogating authority-but not by reappropriating it. A fresh and subtle response to issues relating to cultural diversity, Articulate Silences will be important reading for scholars and students in the fie,4s of literary theory and criticism, women's studies, Asian American studies, and ethnic studies.
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