The Interethnic Imagination

"Several decades after the 1965 easing of U.S. immigration barriers, as the influx of new immigrants began to shuffle into novel social formations, American literature changed as well, absorbing the tensions and the possibilities posed by the transformation. What had been known as ethnic literature evolved into something else, a body of work more accurately described as interethnic. The Interethnic Imagination charts this historic literary shift as it demonstrates how recent social and cultural encounters have sculpted the contemporary Asian American novel." "Theorizing and chronicling an interethnic literary turn, and drawing upon Asian Americanist, postcolonial, and postnational scholarly paradigms, Caroline Rody presents a new optic through which to understand the dynamic interplay shaping ethnic literatures. She examines an extensive range of Asian American fictions, offering sustained readings of several compelling interethnic imaginative projects: Chang-rae Lee's ambivalent evocations of blackness, whiteness, Koreanness, and the multicultural crowd in Native Speaker; Gish Jen's comic engagement with Jewishness in Mona in the Promised Land; and the conjuring of a transnational topography in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange." "Two "interchapters" and an epilogue extend the book's argument by highlighting Asian American fiction's complex engagement with African American culture; its cross-ethnic adoption of Jewishness; and its extended history of mixed-race fictional characters. Persuasively argued and layered with insights into a broad spectrum of novels, The Interethnic Imagination maps the rapidly changing American literary landscape and proffers a fresh, original tack for approaching its liveliest new works." --Book Jacket.