"Jinqi Ling's NARRATING NATIONALISMS liberates Asian American literature from the ideological strictures of academic postmodernism. Ling demonstrates how ideas about race, gender and class in the second half of the 20th century are shaped by Asian American writers in their works, as the writers themselves are consciously shaped by their social and political conditions. This is a vital text for understanding imagination and ideology in the formation ofAsian American literature."-- Russell C. Leong Editor, Amerasia Journal, UCLA"Narrating Nationalisms is a valuable and original intervention into Asian American cultural controversies. The study engages in a tactful yet provocative manner with the current debates on Asian American cultural production, particularly the debates regarding the nature of its oppositional status vis-a-vis dominant American culture. Deploying relevant and erudite concepts on linguistic and cultural phenomenon to explore, elucidate and re-claimselected Asian American literary productions, it is marked by a syncretic and synthesizing power, clarity, and nimbleness.[Lim cont] Ling covers a great deal of ground in a succinct and tightly argued manner, offering both the historicized cultural contexts of central Asian American textheoretical re-considerations on the traditions of realistic narrative and postmodern aesthetics.
His book presents a model of interdisciplinary scholarship carefully constructed on clearly formulated and theoretically informed insights."--Shirley Lim, University of California, Santa Barbara"Jinqi Ling's NARRATING NATIONALISMS liberates Asian American literature from the ideological strictures of academic postmodernism. Ling demonstrates how ideas about race, gender and class in the second half of the 20th century are shaped by Asian American writers in their works, as the writers themselves are consciously shaped by their social and political conditions. This is a vital text for understanding imagination and ideology in the formation ofAsian American literature."-- Russell C. Leong Editor, Amerasia Journal, UCLA"Narrating Nationalisms is a valuable and original intervention into Asian American cultural controversies. The study engages in a tactful yet provocative manner with the current debates on Asian American cultural production, particularly the debates regarding the nature of its oppositional status vis-a-vis dominant American culture. Deploying relevant and erudite concepts on linguistic and cultural phenomenon to explore, elucidate and re-claimselected Asian American literary productions, it is marked by a syncretic and synthesizing power, clarity, and nimbleness.
[Lim cont] Ling covers a great deal of ground in a succinct and tightly argued manner, offering both the historicized cultural contexts of central Asian American textheoretical re-considerations on the traditions of realistic narrative and postmodern aesthetics. His book presents a model of interdisciplinary scholarship carefully constructed on clearly formulated and theoretically informed insights."--Shirley Lim, University of California, Santa Barbara"In this book Jinqi Ling explores questions of racial identity and cultural politics in terms of the formal choice of realist narrative by early Asian American writers, and he seeks to revise current critical opinions in which realist narrative is considered complicit with the hegemony of Western culture. Although each chapter brings fresh insights to familiar texts, I find the chapters on Chu and Kingston to be especially engaging. [It makes an]important contribution.to our understanding of the political meanings of form in Asian American literature." --Mark Chiang, American Literature.