Transpacific displacement : ethnography, translation, and intertextual travel in twentieth-century American literature

Author(s)

    • Huang, Yunte

Bibliographic Information

Transpacific displacement : ethnography, translation, and intertextual travel in twentieth-century American literature

Yunte Huang

University of California Press, c2002

  • : pbk
  • : hbk

Available at  / 21 libraries

Search this Book/Journal

Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Volume

: hbk ISBN 9780520228863

Description

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.

Table of Contents

Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Ethnographers-Out-There: Percival Lowell, Ernest Fenollosa, and Florence Ayscough 2. Ezra Pound: An Ideographer or Ethnographer? 3. The Intertextual Travel of Amy Lowell 4. The Multifarious Faces of the Chinese Language 5. Maxine Hong Kingston and the Making of an "American" Myth 6. Translation as Ethnography: Problems in American Translations of Contemporary Chinese Poetry Conclusion Bibliography Index
Volume

: pbk ISBN 9780520232235

Description

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.

Table of Contents

Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Ethnographers-Out-There: Percival Lowell, Ernest Fenollosa, and Florence Ayscough 2. Ezra Pound: An Ideographer or Ethnographer? 3. The Intertextual Travel of Amy Lowell 4. The Multifarious Faces of the Chinese Language 5. Maxine Hong Kingston and the Making of an "American" Myth 6. Translation as Ethnography: Problems in American Translations of Contemporary Chinese Poetry Conclusion Bibliography Index

by "Nielsen BookData"

Details

Page Top