Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity

Sheng-Mei Ma

Description

Drawing from Anglo-American, Asian American, and Asian literature as well as J-horror and manga, Chinese cinema and Internet, and the Korean Wave, Sheng-mei Ma's Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity probes into the conjoinedness of West and East, of modernity's illusion and nothing's infinitude. Suspended on the stylistic tightrope between research and poetry, critical analysis and intuition, Asian Diaspora restores affect and heart to the experience of diaspora in between East and West, at-homeness and exilic attrition. Diaspora, by definition, stems as much from socioeconomic and collective displacement as it points to emotional reaction. This book thus challenges the fossilized conceptualizations in area studies, ontology, and modernism. The book's first two chapters trace the Asian pursuit of modernity into nothing, as embodied in horror film and the gaming motif in transpacific literature and film. Chapters three through eight focus on the borderlands of East and West, the edges of humanity and meaning. Ma examines how loss occasions a revisualization of Asia in children's books, how Asian diasporic passing signifies, paradoxically, both "born again" and demise of the "old" self, how East turns "East" or the agent of self-fashioning for Anglo-America, Asia, and Asian America, how the construct of "bugman" distinguishes modern West's and East's self-image, how the extreme human condition of "non-person" permeates the Korean Wave, and how manga artists are drawn to wartime Japan. The final two chapters interrogate the West's death-bound yet enlightening Orientalism in Anglo-American literature and China's own schizophrenic split, evidenced in the 2008 Olympic Games.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Digging to China (or America)

Chapter One: Asian Cell and Horror

Chapter Two: Asian Diaspora Does Vegas

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

Chapter Four: A Child's Passing into Asian Diaspora

Chapter Five: yEast for Modern Cannibals

Chapter Six: Bugman in Modernity

Chapter Seven: Kim Ki-duk's Nonperson Films

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

Chapter Nine: Orientalism Goes to War in the Twentieth Century

Chapter Ten: Hyperreal Beijing and the 2008 Olympics

Works Cited

Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Asian American
• American

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 30 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781612492087
• Langue: English

Extrait

Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity
Comparative Cultural Studies Steven T t sy de Zepetnek, Series Editor
The Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies publishes single-authored and thematic collected volumes of new scholarship. Manuscripts are invited for publication in the series in fields of the study of culture, literature, the arts, media studies, communication studies, the history of ideas, etc., and related disciplines of the humanities and social sciences to the series editor via email at [e-mail] . Comparative cultural studies is a contextual approach in the study of culture in a global and intercultural context and work with a plurality of methods and approaches; the theoretical and methodological framework of comparative cultural studies is built on tenets borrowed from the disciplines of cultural studies and comparative literature and from a range of thought including literary and culture theory, (radical) constructivism, communication theories, and systems theories; in comparative cultural studies focus is on theory and method as well as application. For a detailed description of the aims and scope of the series including the style guide of the series link to http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweblibrary/seriespurdueccs . Manuscripts submitted to the series are peer reviewed followed by the usual standards of editing, copy editing, marketing, and distribution. The series is affiliated with CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (ISSN 1481-4374), the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access quarterly published by Purdue University Press at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb .
Volumes in the Purdue series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies include http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/series/comparative-cultural-studies
Sheng-mei Ma, Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity
Irene Marques, Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity
Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies , Ed. Steven T t sy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasv ri
Hui Zou, A Jesuit Garden in Beijing and Early Modern Chinese Culture
Yi Zheng, From Burke and Wordsworth to the Modern Sublime in Chinese Literature
Agata Anna Lisiak, Urban Cultures in (Post)Colonial Central Europe Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror , Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Henry James Morello
Michael Goddard, Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism, and the Subversion of Form
Shakespeare in Hollywood, Asia, and Cyberspace , Ed. Alexander C.Y. Huang and Charles S. Ross
Gustav Shpet s Contribution to Philosophy and Cultural Theory , Ed. Galin Tihanov
Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies , Ed. Louise O. Vasv ri and Steven T t sy de Zepetnek
Marko Juvan, History and Poetics of Intertextuality
Thomas O. Beebee, Nation and Region in Modern American and European Fiction
Paolo Bartoloni, On the Cultures of Exile, Translation, and Writing
Justyna Sempruch, Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature
Kimberly Chabot Davis, Postmodern Texts and Emotional Audiences
Philippe Codde, The Jewish American Novel
Deborah Streifford Reisinger, Crime and Media in Contemporary France
Imre Kert sz and Holocaust Literature , Ed. Louise O. Vasv ri and Steven T t sy de Zepetnek
Camilla Fojas, Cosmopolitanism in the Americas
Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje s Writing , Ed. Steven T t sy de Zepetnek
Jin Feng, The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America , Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Earl E. Fitz
Sophia A. McClennen, The Dialectics of Exile
Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity
Sheng-mei Ma
Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2012 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ma, Sheng-mei.
Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity / by Sheng-mei Ma.
p. cm. -- (Comparative cultural studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55753-611-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-61249-209-4 (epdf) -- ISBN 978-1-61249-208-7 (epub) 1. Asian diaspora. 2. East and West. 3. Popular culture--Asia. 4. Civilization, Modern. 5. American literature--Asian American authors--History and criticism. I. Title.
DS12.M3 2012
305.895--dc23
2011049171
Cover image: underlying photograph iStockphoto.com/EricVega
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Digging to China (or America)
Chapter One Asian Cell and Horror
Chapter Two Asian Diaspora Does Vegas
Chapter Three Diasporic Authors of Children s and Young Adult Books
Chapter Four A Child s Passing into Asian Diaspora
Chapter Five yEast for Modern Cannibals
Chapter Six Bugman in Modernity
Chapter Seven Kim Ki-duk s Nonperson Films
Chapter Eight Nakazawa s A-bomb, Tezuka s Adolf, and Kobayashi s Apologia
Chapter Nine Orientalism Goes to War in the Twentieth Century
Chapter Ten Hyperreal Beijing and the 2008 Olympics
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of parts of some chapters have appeared in the following: chapter 1 in Asian Gothic: Essays on Literature, Film and Anime , ed. Andrew Nock Soon Ng, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008, 187-209; chapter 2 in Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 26 (Winter 2008): 17-32; chapter 5 in Studies in Symbolic Interaction 33 (2009): 149-63; chapter 6 in Of Mice and Men: Animals in Human Signification , ed. Vartan Messier and Nandita Batra, London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009, 152-77; chapter 7 in Asian Cinema Studies 17.2 (2006): 32-46.; chapter 8 in Mechademia 4: War/Time (2009): 183-96; chapter 10 in China Rights Forum 1 (2008): 121-26. All articles are reprinted by permission.
I am indebted to the following individuals, who made it possible for me to complete this book during the period leading up to my Chair Professorship at Taiwan s Providence University, 2012-13: Karin Wurst and David Prestel at my home institution, Michigan State University, Steven T t sy de Zepetnek, I-Chun Wang, Fu-chang Wang, Kun Jong Lee, John Lent, and Patricia Haseltine. As always, I could not have accomplished this or any other project without the support of Lien Hsu and Roan Ma.
Introduction Digging to China (or America)
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 of the last millennium; Chinese metropolises versus the rural hinterland at the turn of this millennium. In both and many more instances, the uneven development of technology results in a power binarism where the modern half in any pair is privileged. Modernity prevails because of its alleged immanence of rejuvenation, which is oftentimes but a time-space compression by virtue of advanced technology. As it is less time-consuming to traverse great distances and accomplish arduous tasks, we come to see each present moment as a new beginning rather than an extension of the past. Modernity, therefore, signifies the new in an absolute sense, which means death to the old; the lifeblood for the modern drains from bodies imagined to be unmodern. Since the old and traditional do not die absolutely, merely metaphorically, modernity is not so much a death sentence for time past as a death rehearsal inherent in time present, not so much an execution as a stay of execution. Any such trial run for the ultimate finale or the apocalypse that modernity pretends to be must cast a deus ex machina of sorts, the nonself or the transcendent, to effect a decisive rupture. Hence, modernities, also known as death rehearsals, are born out of where self and other, East and West, living and nonliving, and other dualities intersect, such as in the daily routine in life, which is a barely noticeable process of dying, a steady digging of one s own grave. Beyond the personal level of aging, death rehearsal takes place on the collective and cultural level. Modernity with its Euro-American imperialist underpinnings has routinely propped itself up on the corpses of the other: Africa (Conrad s Heart of Darkness [1898]), Arabia (Joyce s Araby, [1914], in addition to those detailed in Edward W. Said s Orientalism [1978]), and Asia (not detailed in Said, who focuses on Western representations of the Near East, which overlaps with Arabia). The Triple-A Club, if you will, provides key service to ensure the West s smooth motoring across, or into, the globe.
Dig a hole through the earth, Americans (i.e., US-Americans and Canadians) joke, and you come out on the other side, in China, presumably. Joking aside, the figure of speech suggests the Orientalist thrust that the Orient, crystallized by China, lies diametrically opposed to the Occident. While the modern West fashions its identity by putting an end to the old, its previous incarnation-an empty shell-is shed and transferred onto the Eastern other, an alterity validating and valorizing the West s metamorphosis. As Shu-mei Shih argues, China is part of the peripheral, non-Western alterity that constituted Western modernism ( The Lure of the Modern 4). Modernity hence arises by vacating the Orient into a void, a state of being on the order of death. It is indeed ironic that in the name of digging to reach the other, the West fails to dig or comprehend the East, and the other way around, too, as implied by the parenthesis, (or Amer