This book offers an incisive and ambitious critique of Asian Diaspora culture, looking specifically at literature and visual popular culture. Sheng-mei Ma’s engaging text discusses issues of self and its relationship with Asian Diaspora culture in the global twenty-first century. Using examples from Asia, Asian America, and Asian Diaspora from the West, the book weaves a narrative that challenges the twenty-first century triumphal discourse of Asia and argues that given the long shadow cast across modern film and literature, this upward mobility is inescapably escapist, a flight from itself; Asia’s stunning self-transformation is haunted by self-alienation. The chapters discuss a wealth of topics, including Asianness, Orientalism, and Asian American identity, drawing on a variety of pop culture sources from The Matrix Trilogy to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This book forms an analysis of the new idea of Asian Diaspora that cuts across area, ethnicity, and nation, incorporating itself into the contemporary global culture whilst retaining a distinct Asian flavor. Covering the mediums of literature, film, and visual cultures, this book will be of immense interest to scholars and students of Asian studies and literature, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and film.

Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture: Asia in Flight (Routledge Contemporary Asia Series)

Ma, Sheng-Mei

Reference

Routledge

Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (Routledge Contemporary Asia Series)

Offers a new way of reading Asian American and Asian Diaspora literatures, thereby addressing an overlapping lacuna in ethnic, postcolonial, and area studies: the construction of immigrant subjectivities.This book opens with an interrogation of the representation of immigrants in Asian American and, to a lesser extent, Asian Diaspora literatures, including works by such writers as Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Amy Tan, and Bharati Mukherjee. Immigrant subjectivities in these texts are frequently subsumed in the urgent need to self-fashion an Asian American identity, and take the peculiar form of “immigrant schizophrenic.” Ma also explores how the drive to “claim America” manifests itself as an eroticization of white bodies in male immigrant and minority writers. He then directs his attention to immigrant self-representation from the unique yet representative positionality of Taiwanese immigrants, as found in overseas student literature and in the recent films of Ang Lee. With a contrapuntal reading of the portrayal of immigrants in Asian American and Asian Diaspora literatures, this book maps out a terrain largely uncharted by scholars of various disciplines.

Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (Suny Ser.in Psychoanalysis & Culture)

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

State University of New York Press

Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures

China Pop!: Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Ohio State University Press

Asian American Studies/Literary Theory A polemical analysis of the ways Orientalism speaks through the texts of prominent Asian American writers. Asian American resistance to Orientalism-the Western tradition dealing with the subject and subjugation of the East-is usually assumed. And yet, as this provocative work demonstrates, in order to refute racist stereotypes they must first be evoked, and in the process the two often become entangled. Sheng-mei Ma shows how the distinguished careers of post-1960s Asian American writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Frank Chin, and David Henry Hwang reveal that while Asian American identity is constructed in reaction to Orientalism, the two cultural forces are not necessarily at odds. The vigor with which these Asian Americans revolt against Orientalism in fact tacitly acknowledges the family lineage of the two. To identify the multitude of historical forms appropriated by the deathly embrace of Orientalism and Asian American ethnicity, Ma highlights four types of cultural encounters, embodied in four metaphors of physical states: the "clutch of rape" in imperialist adventure narratives of the 1930s and 1940s, as seen in comic strips of Flash Gordon and Terry and the Pirates and in the Disney film Swiss Family Robinson; the "clash of arms" or martial metaphors in the 1970s and beyond, embodied in Bruce Lee, Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and the video game Mortal Kombat; U.S. multicultural "flaunting" of ethnicity in the work of Amy Tan and in Disney's Mulan; and global postcolonial "masquerading" of ethnicity in the Anglo-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Broad in scope, penetrating in insight, Ma's work exposes the myriad ways in which Orientalism, an integral part of American culture, speaks through the texts of Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans alike. The result is a startling lesson in the construction of cultural identity. Sheng-mei Ma is associate professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University and the author of Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity

History & Criticism

Univ of Minnesota Pr

Asian American Studies/Literary Theory 
A polemical analysis of the ways Orientalism speaks through the texts of prominent Asian American writers. 
Asian American resistance to Orientalism-the Western tradition dealing with the subject and subjugation of the East-is usually assumed. And yet, as this provocative work demonstrates, in order to refute racist stereotypes they must first be evoked, and in the process the two often become entangled. Sheng-mei Ma shows how the distinguished careers of post-1960s Asian American writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Frank Chin, and David Henry Hwang reveal that while Asian American identity is constructed in reaction to Orientalism, the two cultural forces are not necessarily at odds. The vigor with which these Asian Americans revolt against Orientalism in fact tacitly acknowledges the family lineage of the two. 
To identify the multitude of historical forms appropriated by the deathly embrace of Orientalism and Asian American ethnicity, Ma highlights four types of cultural encounters, embodied in four metaphors of physical states: the "clutch of rape" in imperialist adventure narratives of the 1930s and 1940s, as seen in comic strips of Flash Gordon and Terry and the Pirates and in the Disney film Swiss Family Robinson; the "clash of arms" or martial metaphors in the 1970s and beyond, embodied in Bruce Lee, Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and the video game Mortal Kombat; U.S. multicultural "flaunting" of ethnicity in the work of Amy Tan and in Disney's Mulan; and global postcolonial "masquerading" of ethnicity in the Anglo-Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. 
Broad in scope, penetrating in insight, Ma's work exposes the myriad ways in which Orientalism, an integral part of American culture, speaks through the texts of Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans alike. The result is a startling lesson in the construction of cultural identity. 
Sheng-mei Ma is associate professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University and the author of Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). 
Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

Univ. of Minnesota Press

"East-West Montage possesses a unique vision that promises to push discussions of globalization, cultural production, ethnic identity, and bodily metaphors in powerful new directions. Ma is to be praised for his sound scholarship and innovative interpretations. Indeed where others specialize in either the collection of details or the unpacking of text, Ma weaves a strong analytic exegesis rooted in thorough research." ―Richard King, Washington State UniversityApproximately twelve hours’ difference lies between New York and Beijing: The West and the East are, literally, night and day apart. Yet East-West Montage crosscuts the two in the manner of adjacent filmic shots to accentuate their montage-like complementarity. It examines the intersection between East and West―the Asian diaspora (or more specifically Asian bodies in diaspora) and the cultural expressions by and about people of Asian descent on both sides of the Pacific.Following the introduction "Establishing Shots," the book is divided into seven intercuts, which in turn subdivide into dialectically paired chapters focusing on specific body parts or attributes. The range of material examined is broad and rich: the iconography of the opium den in film noir, the writings of Asian American novelists, the swordplay and kung fu film, Japanese anime, the "Korean Wave" (including soap operas like Winter Sonata and the cult thriller Oldboy), Rogers and Hammerstein’s Orientalist musicals, the comic Blackhawk, the superstar status of the Dalai Lama, and the demise of Hmong refugees and Chinese retirees in the U.S.Highly original and immensely readable,East-West Montage will appeal to many working in a range of disciplines, including Asian studies, Asian American studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, film studies, popular culture, and literary criticism.

East-West Montage: Reflections on Asian Bodies in Diaspora

University of Hawaii Press

Cultural Bifocals On Chinese Tv Series And Diaspora Fiction

London, Routledge, [

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ma, Sheng-Mei. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ma, Sheng-Mei