Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2022 -

This ambitious series covers more than a century of Asian American literature in four volumes organized by years: 1850-1930, 1930-65, 1965-96, and 1996-2020. Each volume is ordered thematically within those time frames. As the editors acknowledge, this amount of scholarly analysis is "necessarily reductive" but aims to reach far across the heterogeneity of Asian American literature and be open to a broad range of literary forms and cultural production (e.g., fiction, poetry, journalism, silent film, letters, graphic novels). A strength of the set is emphasis on authors of South Asian descent, which shifts some attention away from East Asian migration stories. The series editors acknowledge how this collection builds on or adds to other recent works in the field, such as Cambridge History of Asian American Literature, ed. by Rajini Srikanth and Min Hyoung Song (2016). The editors and some of the contributors offer recommendations for future consideration in the field, e.g., ecocriticism. The breadth of the literary forms discussed and the comprehensive time period, particularly the analysis of works from the 19th century, make this work a required resource for understanding Asian American literary history.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

Wang (Harvard), North America's preeminent critic in his field, here augments his career-long deep thematic survey of all modern Chinese and Sinophone fiction. He analyzes classic writings of Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Li Rui, and Yan Lianke, and "posthuman" fabulations by Taiwanese Lo Yi-chin and Wu Ming-yi, Chinese Malaysian Kim Chew Ng, and science fiction writers from Liang Qichao to Liu Cixin and Han Song. Wang classifies all this creativity into three kinds of boundary-crossing stories: fables of "transgression," e.g., invasion of the Chinese or global community by human or extraterrestrial aliens and political enemies from within; tales of "transmigration" involving revenants, ghosts, specters, and reincarnations; and allegories of light and dark--of enlightenment and reality-piercing blindness ("transillumination"). The argument proceeds through poetic rhapsody and breathtaking free association, connecting Chinese works possessing biological, ecological, and cosmic themes to memes from Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger, Agamben, and especially Derrida, who allows simultaneous conceptualization of light as darkness and the opposite of darkness. Wang serves up another intellectual tour de force. The ethereal linkages and deconstructive logic and epiphanies are not for the uninitiated.Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.