Editors' Introduction East–West: Diasporic Writings of Asia

Diaspora, defined as the "dispersal/separation from one's native land/culture/ language, physically or metaphorically," is elucidated in this special issue of Comparative Literature Studies on diasporic writings about Asia, synchronically from Japan, India, Turkey to the U.S., and diachronically from eleventh-century Heian Japan through the Third Reich to the twentyfirst century world of East and West. Challenging and resisting political, ideological, cultural, and national boundaries, the authors of these articles offer multifarious visions of the Asian diaspora as highlighted in the significance of literature—its translation, reception, performativity, and human-ism–– on the global map. In short, what connects this wide range of essays is the authors' emphasis on the concept of diaspora as a historic, complex, and continuing phenomenon.

This issue offers a "special" feature—contributions from two diasporic writers, Karen Tei Yamashita (b. 1951) and Yoko Tawada (b. 1960). The Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita, whose parents were originally from Japan and experienced life in an internment camp during World War II, went to Brazil to interview Japanese Brazilians while in college. Upon her return to California with her family (her Brazilian husband and children) years later, she produced novels about Japanese emigrants in Brazil, including Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990) and Brazil-Maru (1992), and about her Japanese/Brazilian/American family's (temporary) return to their heritage in Japan, entitled Circle K Cycles (2001). Her essay for this issue, "Traveling Voices," articulates not only her family's nomadic movement, but also echoes the voices of a number of Japanese/Asian/American writers.

Yoko Tawada, who was born and raised in Japan and has lived in Germany for more than two decades (the majority of which have been spent, literally, on the move throughout the world), writes both in Japanese and German. Bettina Brandt's interview with Tawada focuses on a rare book (made of handmade Japanese paper, washi), entitled Ein Gedicht für ein Buch or A Poem for a Book (1996), a collaboration between Tawada, Stephan Kohler, photographer and papermaker, and Clemens-Tobias Lange, book artist and designer. The collaboration demonstrates Tawada's adherence to language in relation to location, materiality, and performance.

Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru explores the so-called NRI (nonresident Indian) writer Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain, focusing on his oscillation between two "homes"––Mumbai in India, where Chandra is from and which is the source of his creativity, and the U.S., where he lives and writes fiction about India. Like fellow NRIs Spivak and Rushdie, Chandra's critical distance from both worlds is the key to his writings.

Valerie Henitiuk's article, "Going to Bed with Waley: How Murasaki Shikibu Does and Does Not Become World Literature," deals with different translations of the Tale of Genji (eleventh century), written by Murasaki Shikibu, the first and best-known woman author from Heian Japan. The diaspora of the Tale, translated into English by male translators including Authur Waley, is problematized and provocatively displayed before the reader (hypothetically) through Virginia Woolf 's "feminist" eyes.

In a similar manner, Matthew Chozick's article on Haruki Murakami's writings provocatively highlights Murakami's fame and popularity in both the West (U.S. and Europe) and the East (Korea and Taiwan, among others), and harkens then to critical arguments about his lack of "Japaneseness" and his (too great) familiarity with Western (American) pop culture and its capitalist icons in the postmodern world.

In Kader Konuk's article, the original concept of "Diaspora," as the term characterizes the expulsion of the Jews from their historic homeland and their dispersion throughout the world, is literally presented through German Jew Erich Auerbach's escape from the Third Reich to Istanbul in 1935, where the government attempted to build a "modern" nation through European education, abandoning native languages and cultural study. The ironic twists in the thinking of intellectual German Jews, including Auerbach, who, driven away by Hitler, were welcomed in Turkey, analyzes Auerbach's ambiguous situation as an example of "transnational humanism" for modernity in Turkey.

This attempt at rapid "Westernization" in Turkey echoes...