Sheng-mei Ma's Books

Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity

By: Sheng-mei Ma

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Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity

By: Sheng-mei Ma

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.

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Page Count

178

Publisher

Purdue University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1612492088

ISBN 13

9781612492087

Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet

By: Sheng-mei Ma

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Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet

By: Sheng-mei Ma

This book examines the paradox of China and the United States’ literary and visual relationships, morphing between a happy duet and a contentious duel in fiction, film, poetry, comics, and opera from both sides of the Pacific. In the 21st century where tension between the two superpowers escalates, a gaping lacuna lies in the cultural sphere of Sino-Anglo comparative cultures. By focusing on a “Sinophone-Anglophone” relationship rather than a “China-US” one, Sheng-mei Ma eschews realpolitik, focusing on the two languages and the cross-cultural spheres where, contrary to Kipling’s twain, East and West forever meet, like a repetition compulsion bordering on neurosis over the self and its cultural other. Indeed, the coupling of the two—duet-cum-duel—is so predictable that each seems attracted to and repulsed by its dark half, semblable, (in)compatible for their shared larger-than-life-ness.

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Page Count

246

Publisher

Springer

Published Date

ISBN 10

3319580337

ISBN 13

9783319580333

Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture

Asia in Flight

By: Sheng-mei Ma

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Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture

Asia in Flight

By: Sheng-mei Ma

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.

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Page Count

391

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1136893938

ISBN 13

9781136893933

Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures

In Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures

By: Sheng-mei Ma,Ma (Sheng-mei.)

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Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures

In Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures

By: Sheng-mei Ma,Ma (Sheng-mei.)

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.

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Page Count

202

Publisher

SUNY Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0791438295

ISBN 13

9780791438299

Off-White

Yellowface and Chinglish by Anglo-American Culture

By: Sheng-mei Ma

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Off-White

Yellowface and Chinglish by Anglo-American Culture

By: Sheng-mei Ma

How do English-speaking novelists and filmmakers tell stories of China from a Chinese perspective? How do they keep up appearances of pseudo-Sino immanence while ventriloquizing solely in the English language? Anglo writers and their readers join in this century-old game of impersonating and dubbing Chinese. Throughout this wish fulfillment, writers lean on grammatical and conceptual frameworks of their mother tongue to represent an alien land and its yellowface aliens. Off-white or yellow-ish characters and their foreign-sounding speech are thus performed in Anglo-American fiction and visual culture; both yellowface and Chinglish are of, for, by the (white) people. Off-White interrogates seminal Anglo-American fiction and film on off-white bodies and voices. It commences with one Nobel laureate, Pearl Buck, and ends with another, Kazuo Ishiguro, almost a century later. The trajectory in between illustrates that the detective and mystery genres continue unabated their stock yellowface characters, who exude a magnetic field so powerful as to pull in Japanese anime. This universal drive to fashion a foil is ingrained in any will to power, so much so that even millennial China creates an “off-yellow,” darker-hued Orient in Huallywood films to silhouette its global ascent.

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Page Count

384

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1501352180

ISBN 13

9781501352188

The Deathly Embrace

Orientalism and Asian American Identity

By: Sheng-mei Ma

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The Deathly Embrace

Orientalism and Asian American Identity

By: Sheng-mei Ma

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.

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Page Count

214

Publisher

U of Minnesota Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0816637113

ISBN 13

9780816637119

The Last Isle

Contemporary Film, Culture and Trauma in Global Taiwan

By: Sheng-mei Ma

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The Last Isle

Contemporary Film, Culture and Trauma in Global Taiwan

By: Sheng-mei Ma

Taiwan is in danger of becoming the last isle, losing its sovereignty and identity. The Last Isle opens from where Taiwan film scholarship leaves off—the 1980s Taiwan New Cinema, focusing on relatively unknown contemporary films that are “unglobalizable,” such as Cape No. 7, Island Etude, Din Tao, and Seven Days in Heaven. It explores Taiwan films’ inextricability with trauma theory, the irony of loving and mourning Taiwan, multilingualism, local beliefs, and theatrical practices, including Ang Lee’s “white” films. The second half of the book analyzes Taiwan’s popular culture in Western-style food and drink, conditions over living and dying, and English education, concluding with the source of Taiwan’s anxiety—China. This book distinguishes itself from Taiwan scholarship in its stylistic crazy quilt of the scholarly interwoven with the personal, evidenced right from the outset in the poetic title “The Last Isle,” coupled with the “dissertating” subtitle. This approach intertwines the helix of reason and affect, scholarship and emotion. The Last Isle accomplishes a look at globalization from the bottom up, from a global Taiwan whose very existence is in doubt.

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Page Count

209

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1783483407

ISBN 13

9781783483402

The Tao of S

America's Chinee & the Chinese Century in Literature and Film

By: Sheng-mei Ma

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The Tao of S

America's Chinee & the Chinese Century in Literature and Film

By: Sheng-mei Ma

A study of recent shifts in the depictions of Asian cultural stereotypes The Tao of S is an engaging study of American racialization of Chinese and Asians, Asian American writing, and contemporary Chinese cultural production, stretching from the nineteenth century to the present. Sheng-mei Ma examines the work of nineteenth-century "Sinophobic" American writers, such as Bret Harte, Jack London, and Frank Norris, and twentieth-century "Sinophiliac" authors, such as John Steinbeck and Philip K. Dick, as well as the movies Crazy Rich Asians and Disney's Mulan and a host of contemporary Chinese authors, to illuminate how cultural stereotypes have swung from fearmongering to an overcompensating exultation of everything Asian. Within this framework Ma employs the Taoist principle of yin and yang to illuminate how roles of the once-dominant American hegemony—the yang—and the once-declining Asian civilization—the yin—are now, in the twenty-first century, turned upside down as China rises to write its side of the story, particularly through the soft power of television and media streamed worldwide. A joint publication from the University of South Carolina Press and the National Taiwan University Press.

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Page Count

251

Publisher

Univ of South Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1643363085

ISBN 13

9781643363080

Book's by Sheng-mei Ma

Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity

Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity

Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet

Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet

Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture

Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture

Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures

Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures

Off-White

Off-White

The Deathly Embrace

The Deathly Embrace

The Last Isle

The Last Isle

The Tao of S

The Tao of S

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