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Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds

Online ISBN:
9781479800551
Print ISBN:
9781479800070
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds

Published online:
24 March 2016
Published in print:
17 January 2014
Online ISBN:
9781479800551
Print ISBN:
9781479800070
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, this book argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts. The book specifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the individual author's ethnoracial makeup does not directly overlap with that of the storytelling perspective. Through rigorous analysis of novels and short fiction, such as Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex, Sabina Murray's A Carnivore's Inquiry, and Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind, the book reveals how the construction of narrative perspective allows the Asian American writer a flexible aesthetic canvas upon which to engage issues of oppression and inequity, power and subjectivity, and the complicated construction of racial identity. Speaking to concerns running through postcolonial studies and American literature at large, the book employs an interdisciplinary approach to reveal the unbounded nature of fictional worlds.

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