Recovered Legacies

"Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature" employs contemporary and traditional readings of representative works in prose, poetry, and drama to suggest new ways of understanding and appreciating the critically fertile but underexamined body of Asian American writing from the late 1800s to the early 1960s. The essays in this volume engage this corpusOCocomposed of multiple genres from different periods and by authors of different ethnicitiesOCowith a strong awareness of historical context and a keen sensitivity to literary form. As a collection, "Recovered Legacies" re-establishes the rich and diverse literary heritage of Asian America and argues persuasively for the significance of these works to the American literary canon."

Introduction - Keith Lawrence and Floyd Cheung; Early Chinese American Autobiography: Reconsidering the Works of Yan Phou Lee and Yung Wing - Floyd Cheung; The Self and Generic Convention: Winnifred Eaton's Me, A Book of Remembrance - David Shih; Diasporic Literature and Identity in A Daughter of the Samurai - Georgina Dodge; The Capitalist and Imperialist Critique in H. T. Tsiang's And China Has Hands - Julia H. Lee; Unacquiring Negrophobia: Younghill Kang and the Cosmopolitan Resistance to the Black and White Logic of Naturalization - Stephen Knadler; Asian American (Im)mobility: Perspectives on the College Plays 1937-1955 - Josephine Lee; Toyo Suyemoto and the Landscape of Justice - John Streamas; Wounded Bodies and the Cold War: Freedom, Materialism, and Revolution in Asian American Literature, 1946-1957 - Viet Nguyen; Shades of Absence and Presence in Internment-Themed Literature: Dissent in the West Coast Narratives of John Okada and Toshio Mori - Suzanne Arakawa; Richard Kim, Toshio Mori, and Allegories of Masculine Identity and Place - Keith Lawrence; Writing "Home" from the Margins: Memory, History, and Text in Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter - Warren D. Hoffman; The "Pre-History" of an "Asian American" Writer: N.V.M. Gonzalez' Allegory of Decolonization - Augusto Espiritu; Representing Korean American Female Subjects, Negotiating Multiple Americas, and Reading Beyond the Ending in Ronyoung Kim's Clay Walls - Pamela Thoma