Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity

Cover

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Title Page

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Copyright Page

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Contents

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pp. v-vi

Acknowledgments

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pp. vii-viii

Introduction Digging to China (or America)

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pp. 1-6

Living is dying, an unscripted, unconscious rehearsal for the premiere of death—one show only for each individual serving the life sentence, cyclical reruns for collective humanity. In similar denial, modernity has dissociated itself from death and the other, death as the other. Modernity is a dream posited on the dialectical relation between self and other: industrialized West versus pre-industrial East at the turn...

Chapter One: Asian Cell and Horror

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pp. 7-24

The human body is a cell, a prison house, from which the voice, the speaker of the mind, escapes through the invisible line of a cell phone, computer, or film reel. That umbilical cord to Western technology eases Asian subjects' atomization, but paradoxically implicates the cell, telephone, and computer user in a web of bondage...

Chapter Two: Asian Diaspora Does Vegas

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pp. 25-36

When Asian diaspora plays, it oftentimes comes to Las Vegas or a casino or venue with gaming devices. Las Vegas and the like provide the culmination of Asian diaspora, which is, in essence, taking risks in casting oneself out of home and into the unfamiliar, a gamble in view of all the variables and pitfalls. The euphoria of possible winning is always haunted by the keen or repressed sense of loss over homeland...

Chapter Three: Diasporic Authors of Children's and Young Adult Books

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pp. 37-48

The concept of childhood, according to Phillippe Aries, "first appeared in the 1600s and gradually developed as children began to be distinguished from adults" (qtd. in Griswold, "The Disappearance" 35). Lillian Smith contends in The Unreluctant Years (1991) that "the first modern picture books . . . appeared in the last quarter of the last century. With them are indissolubly associated the names of Walter Crane...

Chapter Four: A Child's Passing into Asian Diaspora

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pp. 49-61

When Hakyung Kang, my daughter's twelve-year-old classmate in East Lansing, Michigan for four years, prepared to return to Seoul, Korea, with her family in the summer of 2006 at the completion of her dad's doctorate, she, quiet and reserved, never voiced her feelings about the imminent departure. On the eve of their flight, when she carpooled with my daughter and I asked her what she herself would have...

Chapter Five: yEast for Modern Cannibals

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pp. 62-83

Much ink (computer printers' blood) has been spilled by Western critics on Dracula and his dark horde, by Asianists on Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" and the Korean Wave's cannibalistic motif, and by Asian Americanists on food pornography. My argument herein, however, proposes a dinner table of three, each guest drawn to...

Chapter Six: Bugman in Modernity

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pp. 84-100

According to the Animal Encyclopedia published by the popular Dorling Kindersley book publisher, the animal kingdom "divides into two types: those animals without backbones, called invertebrates; and those with backbones, called vertebrates. . . . Most invertebrates are insects—with more than one million described and catalogued" (16). The counterparts to insects, or the most populous species among...

Chapter Seven: Kim Ki-duk's Nonperson Films

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pp. 101-112

Korea's national dish or side dish, kimchi, has made only cameo appearances in Kim Ki-duk's corpus of over a dozen films, for instance, in 3-Iron (2004), where the trespassers into empty houses (Bin-jip, the original Korean title) claim the homeowners' dinner table as their own. Indeed, kimchi rarely occupies a place in Kim's staged meals...

Chapter Eight: Nakazawa's A-bomb, Tezuka's Adolf, and Kobayashi's Apologia

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pp. 113-122

"The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia," writes Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (xiv). This zeitgeist of looking backwards materializes in Japanese manga and anime as a belated rendezvous with World War II, as a gaze across half a century into the Rising Sun and the invariable...

Chapter Nine: Orientalism Goes to War in the Twentieth Century

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pp. 123-137

Orientalism does not go to war; Orientalism is war, with East and West pitted against each other ideologically, if not militarily. In war, one engages the enemy to inflict maximum injury, to do away with the other altogether, at least its will to wage war. Orientalism as a Western imaginary that subjugates the East, hence, befits the...

Chapter Ten: Hyperreal Beijing and the 2008 Olympics

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pp. 138-146

The Beijing Olympics commenced on 8 August 2008 with great fanfare in the opening ceremony orchestrated by the fifth-generation filmmaker Zhang Yimou, aided by Steven Spielberg (before he quit to protest China's policy on Darfur) and what the People's Daily dubs the "five-tiger generals," including such a Chinese celebrity...

Works Cited

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pp. 147-162

Index

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pp. 163-168