"A Different Mirror" is a dramatic new retelling of our nation's history, a powerful larger narrative of the many different peoples who together compose the United States of America. In a lively account filled with the stories and voices of people previously left out of the historical canon, Ronald Takaki offers a fresh perspective - a "re-visioning" - of our nation's past.

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. First Edition.

A recent explosion of publishing activity by a wide range of talented writers has placed Asian American literature in the limelight. As the field of Asian American literary studies gains increasing recognition, however, questions of misreading and appropriation inevitably arise. How is the growing body of Asian American works to be read? What holds them together to constitute a tradition? What distinguishes this tradition from the "mainstream" canon and other "minority" literatures? In the first comprehensive book on Asian American literature since Elaine Kim's ground- breaking 1982 volume, Sau-ling Wong addresses these issues and explores their implications for the multiculturalist agenda.Wong does so by establishing the "intertextuality" of Asian American literature through the study of four motifs--food and eating, the Doppelg, nger figure, mobility, and play--in their multiple sociohistorical contexts. Occurring across ethnic subgroup, gender, class, generational, and historical boundaries, these motifs resonate with each other in distinctly Asian American patterns that universalistic theories cannot uncover. Two rhetorical figures from Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, "Necessity" and "Extravagance, " further unify this original, wide-ranging investigation. Authors studied include Carlos Bulosan, Frank Chin, Ashley Sheun Dunn, David Henry Hwang, Lonny Kaneko, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, David Wong Louie, Darrell Lum, Wing Tek Lum, Toshio Mori, Bharati Mukherjee, Fae Myenne Ng, Bienvenido Santos, Monica Sone, Amy Tan, Yoshiko Uchida, Shawn Wong, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Wakako Yamauchi.

Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance

Most racial-ethnic stereotypes about Asian Americans are constructed, activated, and perpetuated by the media, but very few empirical studies have ever investigated the extent to which people accept the media stereotypes about Asians. This study applied cultivation theory to examine whether people's perceptions of Asian Americans are consistent with media stereotypes and whether the media activated racial-ethnic stereotypes affect people's interaction behaviors with Asians. Results demonstrate that people's perceptions and judgments about Asian Americans are largely aligned with the media representations, and these stereotypes impact people's intent to interact with Asians. Four specific findings were obtained. First, among racial-ethnic groups in the U.S., Asians are perceived as most likely to achieve academic success; second, Asians are most likely to be perceived as nerds; third, Asians are perceived as most likely to be left out; and last, people are least likely to initiate friendship with ...

Asian Americans Beyond the Model Minority Stereotype: The Nerdy and the Left Out

Prior studies of portrayals of Asian Americans in advertising have found limited representation and portrayals that are skewed toward technology-based products, business and science magazines, and business settings and relationships. This article examines current Asian American portrayals. Findings indicate that, despite improved representation, stereotyped portrayals persist. The “model minority” stereotype, which suggests that Asian Americans are hardworking, technologically savvy, business oriented, successful, and well assimilated, is clearly reflected in advertising portrayals. Portrayals of Asian Americans in family and social contexts are seldom seen. Moreover, even magazines with high Asian American readership reflect the same stereotypes.

Asian Americans in Magazine Advertising: Portrayals of the “Model Minority”:

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the absence of Asian bodies on US stages resulted in actors developing what Josephine Lee calls "a complex set of codes for the presentation of the Oriental Other" that borrowed from the lexicon of Asian stereotypes.1 I group such codes?conventional associations of signs and meanings that purportedly convey "Asian-ness"?under the term yellowface performance. Actors in yellowface, such as Luise Rainer in the film The Good Earth, David Carradine in the television series Kung Pu, and Jonathan Pryce in the musical Miss Saigon have sparked debates about the production of Asian representations in dominant media.2 But the relative obscurity of nineteenth-century yellowface performers impedes contextualization of these disputes. This article excavates some of this history by sifting through extant records concerning the white actor Charles Parsloe during the 1870s.3 Because of the popularity of his "Chinamen" (a term I self-consciously invoke as a counterpoint to the lived experience of Chinese men), Parsloe provides the most comprehensive case study available with which to examine early yellowface practice. As a popular performer, his embodiment of the Chinaman both depends on and

Charles Parsloe's Chinese Fetish: An Example of Yellowface Performance in Nineteenth-Century American Melodrama

This groundbreaking study of a little-explored branch of American literature both chronicles and reinterprets the variety of patterns found within Hawaii's pastoral and heroic literary traditions, and is unprecedented in its scope and theme. As a literary history, it covers two centuries of Hawaii's culture since the arrival of Captain James Cookin 1778. Its approach is multicultural, representing the spectrum of native Hawaiian, colonial, tourist, and polyethnic local literatures. Explicit historical, social, political, and linguistic context of Hawaii, as well as literary theory, inform Stephen Sumida's analyses and explications of texts, which in turn reinterpret the nonfictional contexts themselves. These "texts" include poems, song lyrics, novels and short fiction, drama and oral traditions that epitomize cultural milieus and sensibilities.Hawaii's rich literary tradition begins with ancient Polynesian chant and encompasses the compelling novels of O.A. Bushnell, Shelley Ota, Kazuo Miyamoto, Milton Marayama, and John Dominis Holt; the stories of Patsy Saiki and Darrell Lum; the dramas of Aldyth Morris; the poetry of Cathy Song, Erick Chock, Jody Manabe, Wing Tek Lum, and others of the contemporary "Bamboo Ridge" group; Hawaiian songs and poetry, or mele; and works written by visitors from outside the islands, such as the journals of Captain Cook and the prose fiction of Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and James Michener. Sumida discusses the renewed enthusiasm for native Hawaiian culture and the controversies over Hawaii's vernacular pidgins and creoles. His achievement in developing a functional and accessible critical and intellectual framework for analyzing this diverse material is remarkable, and his engaging and perceptive analysis of these works invites the reader to explore further in the literature itself and to reconsider the present and future direction of Hawaii's writers.

Stephen H. Sumida

Papers

And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai'i

East of California: Points of Origin in Asian American Studies

Growing Up Asian American

A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature

Centers without Margins: responses to Centrism in asian American Literature