Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover _City On Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_ London: Verso, 1999 ISBN 1-... more Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover _City On Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_ London: Verso, 1999 ISBN 1-85984-203-8 372 pp.
In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related... more In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related anti-Asian hate, modest forms of engagement such as reading and viewing lists were often suggested as means of fostering sympathy and understanding. This essay argues that combating contemporary Asian American hate requires a more explicit focus on countering invisibility. This objective, necessitated by the ways in which ethnic Asians have been systematically elided and rendered as foreign throughout US history, should focus exclusively on educating Americans about Chinese Exclusion and other facts of America's systemic racism against ethnic Asians. Such an approach acknowledges the very different modes of racialized surveillance by which Asian Americans have historically been othered.
In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related... more In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related anti-Asian hate, modest forms of engagement such as reading and viewing lists were often suggested as means of fostering sympathy and understanding. This essay argues that combating contemporary Asian American hate requires a more explicit focus on countering invisibility. This objective, necessitated by the ways in which ethnic Asians have been systematically elided and rendered as foreign throughout US history, should focus exclusively on educating Americans about Chinese Exclusion and other facts of America's systemic racism against ethnic Asians. Such an approach acknowledges the very different modes of racialized surveillance by which Asian Americans have historically been othered.
Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover _City On Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_ London: Verso, 1999 ISBN 1-... more Lisa Odham Stokes and Michael Hoover _City On Fire: Hong Kong Cinema_ London: Verso, 1999 ISBN 1-85984-203-8 372 pp.
In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related... more In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related anti-Asian hate, modest forms of engagement such as reading and viewing lists were often suggested as means of fostering sympathy and understanding. This essay argues that combating contemporary Asian American hate requires a more explicit focus on countering invisibility. This objective, necessitated by the ways in which ethnic Asians have been systematically elided and rendered as foreign throughout US history, should focus exclusively on educating Americans about Chinese Exclusion and other facts of America's systemic racism against ethnic Asians. Such an approach acknowledges the very different modes of racialized surveillance by which Asian Americans have historically been othered.
In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related... more In the global outpouring during the 2020 racial justice protests and coverage of pandemic-related anti-Asian hate, modest forms of engagement such as reading and viewing lists were often suggested as means of fostering sympathy and understanding. This essay argues that combating contemporary Asian American hate requires a more explicit focus on countering invisibility. This objective, necessitated by the ways in which ethnic Asians have been systematically elided and rendered as foreign throughout US history, should focus exclusively on educating Americans about Chinese Exclusion and other facts of America's systemic racism against ethnic Asians. Such an approach acknowledges the very different modes of racialized surveillance by which Asian Americans have historically been othered.
The term "Asian American art" was propagated in the late 1960s by activists eng... more The term "Asian American art" was propagated in the late 1960s by activists engaged with the contemporary racial justice movement and may therefore imply a politicized and oppositional aesthetics. The label can be misleading for ethnic Asian artists practicing before the late 1960s, whose biography and aesthetic concerns differ. 1 For example, celebrated watercolor painter Dong Kingman (1911-2000) is known for an expressive watercolor style in which "lively impressions of America" are "handle[d by] brush in an adept Oriental fashion." 2 Dong's syncretic style reflects his biography as a native-born US citizen who started formal art education in China, studying with a teacher trained in both European and Chinese painting techniques. Far from the confrontational positioning of the generation that succeeded him, Dong found ready support within the US cultural establishment. In the 1930s, Dong was one of many young artists supported through the Depression by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and, in the mid-1950s, he traveled throughout Asia on behalf of the US State Department as part of a goodwill tour promoting transpacific relations.
PAPER PELLETS: BRITISH LITERARY CULTURE AFTER WATERLOO. By Richard Cronin. Oxford: Oxford Univers... more PAPER PELLETS: BRITISH LITERARY CULTURE AFTER WATERLOO. By Richard Cronin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. x + 268. ISBN 978 0 19 958253 2. £99.00. The critical scholarship on periodicals and their impact on nineteenth-century literature has reached a new zenith with Richard Cronin's latest book, Paper Pellets. Back in 1989 Lynn Pykett, in an article published in Victorian Periodicals Review entitled 'Reading the Periodical Press: Text and Context', felt obliged to caution aspiring scholars about the interdisciplinary and potentially infinite nature of periodical research. Building upon a seminal essay by Michael Wolff, Pykett observed that a truly informed study of periodicals would require familiarity with various temporal forms of publication, the many individual series within those subcategories, the miscellaneous content in each issue and the writers, editors and publishers of these publications as well as their circulation and audience - in sum, a mandat...
Charles J. Rzepka. Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture: In... more Charles J. Rzepka. Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture: Inventions and Interventions. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. 287. $99.95. As many of us no doubt have mentioned to our students, the diversity of thought that existed before the mid-nineteenth-century differentiation of disciplines was a significant reason for the vitality of intellectual production in the Romantic era. Cutting-edge science informed by microscopes and electricity experiments coexisted with Shelley's idealism and abstraction; philology, linguistics, and religion were all part of Coleridge's metaphysical stew; and the many different and often unrelated research and speculations that filled the pages of contemporary periodicals were both destined for and emanated from a motley intellectual arena that included amateurs as well as what would be recognized today as specialists or professionals. A similarly exhilarating mix of topics appears in Selected Studies in Romantic and American Literature, History, and Culture: Inventions and Interventions, a new volume that reprints some of Charles Rzepka's best essays of the past twenty years. In articles ranging from the Romantic canon to Poe, Freud, Elizabeth Bishop, Charlie Chan and the Wizard of Oz, Inventions and Interventions annals a scholarly career equally as distinguished for its eclecticism as for its accomplishment. One of the obvious pleasures of such a volume is the chance to track Rzepka's most important critical contributions, such as the recurring discussion of gifts and transactional relationships (featured in three articles on Wordsworth and De Quincey) that would culminate in Rzepka's illluminating Sacramental Commodities. The diversity of the topics also signals the interest in detection and crime narratives that have extended Rzepka's work beyond the geographical and temporal borders of British Romanticism, and which seem to lead his current interests (the three most recent essays are those on Poe, Charlie Chan, and Godwin). Indeed, in its astute synthesis of genre criticism, regional history, and Asian American studies, Rzepka's essay on Charlie Chan is particularly impressive. The essay, a revisionary interpretation which rejects orientalist charges for the much maligned character and instead argues for his generic and historical significance at a time when strictures against Asian immigration were extreme, anticipates Yunte Huang's much celebrated current book (Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History) by several years. Thus, while the topics of some of the later essays may at first seem surprising for Romantic scholars, one thing that the volume's collection helps reveal is the close connection between space, place, identity, and power that has always driven Rzepka's scholarship, and how his Romantic training shaped these more current interests. However, to suggest that the merits of Inventions and Interventions lies only in intellectual biography is to do the book a disservice, as it deflects attention from the conceptual achievements accrued by this compilation. A major attraction of the volume is its glimpse into detection as a critical practice, which only Rzepka's idiosyncratic mix of Romantic sensibilities and twentieth-century historical practice can demonstrate. Throughout all of the essays, Rzepka's facility for deductive analysis is repeatedly on display, as he poses scholarly queries, considers existing criticism (usually on a case-by-case basis), brings to bear historical context and contemporary texts (often based on the most tenuous or fleeting of coincidences), and works through critical problems by painstaking close reading (often facilitated by a colloquial restatement of key textual passages) and usually aided by sequences of rhetorical questions. …
... The reader may be puzzled a bit by Sandi ford's introduction, which opens by referencing... more ... The reader may be puzzled a bit by Sandi ford's introduction, which opens by referencing the "first ... Sandiford's admixture of a French text in an otherwise strictly English col lection points up ... by Mather Byles (chapter 1), and The Dunciad in relation to works by Timothy Dwight and ...
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