Just to let you know I don't just buy books...

I finished reading Cold War Orientalism this morning. I found the book to be both interesting on its own terms and helpful to my thinking about my dissertation project. It introduced me to what Klein argues were some of the dominant Cold War era discourses in the U.S. regarding U.S.-Asian relations, both in terms of external relations and in terms of the assimilation of Asians within the U.S. The latter Klein sees as a way for the U.S. to demonstrate to Asia its good intentions during the Cold War era competition for the 'heart' of Asia. (I'm not sure how much Klein sees this as a primary motive for the middlebrow intellectuals' treatment of Asian Americans in their work.)

As I mentioned elsewhere, the idea that middlebrow intellectuals--and the government--in the U.S. encouraged Americans to develop a sense of empathy for the people of Asia provides a useful connection (or counterpoint) to the kind of empathy that development scholars like Daniel Lerner argued was necessary for people in Third World countries. Lerner argued that empathy was necessary for people in undeveloped countries so that they could learn to imagine ways of living that were different from their own. This would provide motivation for the integration of the various groups (tribes, clans) into the "imagined community" (not Lerner's term, of course!) of the nation and for the integration of the new nations into the global community (a community that excluded Communist countries, of course). The kind of empathy that Americans needed to develop, according to Klein, was something that would enable Americans to avoid the accusations of imperialism that were made against other Western powers.

Klein's chapter "How to Be an American Abroad: James Michener's The Voice of Asia and Postwar Mass Tourism" gives a good example of the discourse of empathy that she describes. She argues that Michener positions himself as "a 'listening man'" who does not privilege his own voice in the book but rather privileges the voices of the people he interviews. "Michener presents himself and his interviewees as leaping governments and engaging in direct communication with each other," she writes (132). Michener's portrayal of himself as a listener is an embodiment of the "curious and open-minded American presence in Asia" (133) that was part of the ideal of an empathetic America.

I also like the fact that although Klein does critique what she analyzes (pointing out, for instance, how Michener's work feeds into "the liberal critique of racism as individual prejudice [that] proliferated in the late 1940s and 1950s" [134]), she also tries to read these texts sympathetically, as well. She argues, for instance, that "it would be a mistake to dismiss Michener's liberalism as only a mystification of neocolonial expansion" (135). She prefers to see the texts and the discourses in which they participated as more complicated than that--as having more than one kind of effect on or relationship to the U.S.'s role in Asia.

[Update: I should also mention that I finished Fires of the Dragon early last week. It was quite an enlightening read. It was a fast read, too--I guess because of its narrative style.]

[books] [Cold War Orientalism] [empathy] [James Michener] [The Voice of Asia]

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Just received my copy of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 by Christina Klein. I got the hardback edition for US$9.95 through the University of California Press website's sale. (Other books should be coming soon.)

Klein's book looks really interesting and useful to me. I'll probably post some goodies on my dissertation blog soon. [here] For now I want to quote something from the beginning of the book, where Klein is analyzing a scene from the play/movie The King and I. Klein argues that although the setting for the play is the late 19th century, it really spoke to American concerns with their relationship to Asia during the Cold War period. She argues that the sentimental relationship of Anna to the Siamese is "an idealized self-representation of the middlebrow artists and intellectuals" Klein discusses in her book. Klein illustrates this by analyzing two things going on in the scene that culminates in the "Getting to Know You" singalong:

At one level the scene produces a hierarchical relation between West and East: Anna is an adult who dispenses knowledge, and her students are ignorant children subordinate to her authority. When Anna replaces the old Siamese map with the new English one, she replaces the local and implicitly inferior knowledge of the Siamese with a metropolitan and implicitly superior knowledge derived from European models. In the best Orientalist fashion, she denies the Siamese the ability to represent themselves and insists that they can only know themselves through a Western and literally Eurocentric system of knowledge. But something else is going on here as well: Anna is more interested in forging connections between East and West than she is in demarcating racial and cultural differences. ... She presents a world in which East and West can be understood as related to one another outside the coercive ties of empire. A shared history of political independence, as well as small size, implicitly connects England and Siam. Anna animates this vision of interconnectedness by infusing it with emotion: as she sings "Getting to Know You," she translates the map's geography lesson into a playful song about the intimate bonds of friendship that can reach across national and cultural divides. More important, Anna opens up a way for the children to participate in the forging of these emotional--and international--ties when she invites them to sing along. ... By the end of the number the hierarchical differences that structured the scene at the outset ... are looser, although they do not disappear entirely. (11-12)

I must admit that when I have watched the movie The King and I in the past, I never looked at the "Getting to Know You" scene from this kind of perspective. But Klein's point about Anna's encouraging the students to sing along with her puts a new twist on the lyrics of the song. If we just think about Anna's point of view--when she's singing--lines like "Telling you my dreams, / Getting to feel that you're with me" sound as though her main concern is with having her students identify with her. But when the students sing, the point of view changes and now they're telling her their dreams. Thus there's at some level the expectation of an intercultural interchange going on here, despite the hierarchical relations between Anna and the Siamese children. I am struck by this because it complicates the notion of the cultural imperialism of Anna's actions.

Later in the book Klein engages in an in-depth analysis of the play and movie, concluding that

Anna's loving instruction establishes an exemplary hegemonic relationship: it achieves its goals through sentiment rather than through physical force and by inculcating a desire on the part of its objects to behave in a certain way. It suggests power exercised not through political or military control, but through relations of exchange and influence. Anna's influence, like American-guided modernization, results in local leaders governing themselves but always according to Anna's precepts. (215)

I should note that Klein stresses the "ideal" nature of the images of Anna and of the United States here. She isn't suggesting that this is what actually happened. (Certainly Taiwan's experience during the postwar years is enough to illustrate how tenuous the connection was between this image and the reality of U.S. influence in Asia.)

Anyway, I'm glad I found this book--and grateful to Rex at the Savage Minds blog who mentioned the U. of California Press book sale!

[I should add here--for people who are wondering why I'd go to the trouble of buying this book rather than getting it out of the library--according to Taiwan's National Bibliographic Information Network, no library in Taiwan owns this book... *sigh*]

[books] [Cold War Orientalism] [The King and I]

CFP: America's Asia, Asia's America

The 2007 Texas Tech Comparative Literature Symposium on "America's Asia, Asia's America"

April 13-14, 2007 at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas

Texas Tech University houses the largest Vietnam Archive in the United States, and West Texas has been home to thousands of Vietnamese/Asian Americans. Late spring in Lubbock is usually mild and sunny.

Keynote Speakers:

Sheldon Xiao-peng Lu, Comparative Literature Program, UC-Davis;
Rob Wilson, Department of Literature, UC-Santa Cruz;
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Asian American Studies Program, UC-Berkeley

Proposal Submission Deadline: January 12, 2007

With great progress in technological innovation and economic development in China, India, and other Asian countries in recent decades, the twenty-first century has increasingly been identified and envisioned as "the Asian-Pacific century" or "the Chinese century" in the global media. What political and cultural implications does this new construction of Asia generate? How will these revitalized Asian nation-states articulate their own desires and reposition themselves in the context of the U.S.-centered global order? How will the United States redefine itself in relation to the rise of this new Asia? What lessons has the United States drawn in its political, economic, cultural, and military encounters with these Asian nation-states since the late nineteenth century?

This symposium looks for papers that will engage these challenging questions and theorize their complexity and historicity in both the Asian and North American contexts. We not only welcome proposals that examine the construction of Asia in terms of space production and reconsider Asian America as a process of racial formation, but we also encourage projects that investigate ways in which information technology, trans-Pacific movements, as well as Asian language communication may impact the futures of both Asia and North America.

Possible topics may include but are not restricted to the following:

--Modernism and the Literary Representation of Asia

--The Cold War and the Cultural Imagination of Asia

--Cold War Legacy and National Division

--Cyberpunk Fiction and the Reinvention of Asia

--Orientalism Revisited

--Postcolonial Asian Literatures and Cultures

--Trash Aesthetics and the Hong Kong Kung Fu Cinema

--Sex, Violence, and Fantasy in the Japanese Manga and Anime

--From Hollywood to Bollywood

--Asians and Asian Americans in Hollywood Cinema and American Popular Culture

--Transnational Asian American Literature

--Globalization and Asian American Popular Culture

--Asian American Studies and Latino/a Studies

--Asian American Studies and African American Studies

--The Discourse of "Human Rights" and the Re-construction of Asia

--SARS, Avian Flu, and the New "Yellow Peril"

--Technology, Espionage, and Asian American Communities

--Blogging and New Asian Nationalisms

--Vietnam War Literature and Culture

--War, Empire, and the Global Market

Please send your one-page proposal and one-page C.V. by January 15, 2007:

Dr. Yuan Shu
Department of English
P.O. Box 43091
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409-3091

You may email your inquiry, proposal, and C.V. to Dr. Yuan Shu at (yuan.shu [at] ttu.edu).

Yuan Shu
Associate Professor of English
Director of the Comparative Literature Program
Texas Tech University
Box 43091
Lubbock, TX 79409-3091
E-mail: yuan.shu [at] ttu.edu
V-mail: 806-742-2500x240
Fax: 806-742-0989

(via CFP list)

Writing projects and other frustrations

Since I turned in my grades on May 2, I've been trying to get started on some writing projects for the summer. I'm not teaching this summer, thanks in part to the pay raise that came with my "upgrade," so I decided to make use of my time to read and write--and more generally, to think about life directions at this stage. As my old friend ERG reminded me a few months ago, we've been teaching college students since 1990--over half our lives!

I've completed one mini-project so far, which was to write a few posts here about the writing assignments we worked on in ENGW 1102 (First Year Writing for Multilingual Students) this past semester. In case you missed those posts, they're here, here, and here. (Sorry, but I read something on a writing website that said you should link to your previous blog posts whenever possible!)

The second project that I'm currently working on is a revision of a paper I presented at the Boston MLA conference about 3 years ago; I hope to get that done soon so I can send it to a journal for review by the end of this month. The revision work has been a bit slow going, though, partly due to some confusion about how to end it (I hate writing conclusions!) and partly due to the general lethargy I'm feeling as a result of hay fever. This month has been terrible so far for pollen. So far I'm celebrating little victories like finding my copies of Cold War Orientalism and The Rhetoric of Empire, which I thought were lost after our move last year. Now that I've given myself a deadline, however (the end of the month), I hope that I will work harder on my revisions.

Finally, I hope to develop and work on some sort of writing project in response to the recent death of my father. He passed away in April after a short stay in a hospice, and I've been experiencing quite a mix of feelings since then. After we came back from the burial, I located a CD of interviews that my brother had done with my parents starting in the mid-1990s. I had never listened to them before, and I started listening to one of the interviews from 1995. I was surprised at how my father sounded back then--very different from my more recent memories of talking with him. I want to listen to the interviews more and think about what I might write about him--possibly using the interviews in the process. Maybe it will just be some blog posts about him, but maybe it will be something more developed or "formal." We'll see.

More new books in the former native speaker's library

...in increasing order of how excited I am to have gotten them:

• Communication and Global Society, ed. Guo-Ming Chen and William J. Starosta (NY: Peter Lang, 2000)
  Several chapters in this collection look interesting, including Hui-Ching Chang's "Reconfiguring the Global Society: 'Greater China' as Emerging Community" and Starosta and Chen's "Listening Across Diversity in Global Society".
  


• The Voice of Asia, by James A. Michener (NY: Random House, 1951)
  As I mentioned earlier, this book was discussed in Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism. I don't think she mentioned, though, that Michener has a section on Formosa that includes five short chapters: "Indian Summer in Formosa" (a chat with Y.P. Tom, a Chinese C-47 pilot), "The Governor's Mansion" (a chat with Edith Wu, the wife of K. C. Wu, Governor of Formosa), "The Hard Way" (a chat with Liu Ping, a political science student at Taiwan University), "The Tank Commanders" (a chat with "four young fellows, tough, straight and aching for a fight"), and a chapter called "Observations". I'll talk more about this later, but right now I'll just make the observation that Michener's interviewees were all Mainlanders with a burning desire to reconquer the mainland. He evidently didn't talk with any Taiwanese or anyone who had a doubt that the KMT could reconquer the mainland (with the help of the U.S., that is). (A note of thanks, by the way, to my brother and sister-in-law, who sent the book to me, and to Ainsworth Books, who did a great job of packing the book when they sent it to my brother and s-i-l!)
  
  [Update: The K. C. Wu mentioned above also figured in Fires of the Dragon. Henry Liu interviewed Wu as part of his biography of Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK). Kaplan describes him as someone who "attempted to nurture a genuine democracy on the island" and notes that, "after watching CCK's agents spread a reign of terror across the island, [Wu] finally broke with the Chiang regime and fled to America" in 1954 (192). Ironically, Michener's chapter about Edith Wu ends with her apologizing for some unfinished work on the governor's house. She says, "'We've omitted some of the little finishings. After all, we do not think of this as our permanent home'" (97). But if she expected they would be moving to Savannah, Georgia Evanston, Illinois within four years, she didn't let Michener know.]
  


• A Pail of Oysters, by Vern Sneider (NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1953)
  Sneider is more well-known for his book Teahouse of the August Moon, which was made into a movie starring Marlon Brando (as an Okinawan!). As Keelung Hong commented at a talk at Berkeley in 2003,

  Hollywood did not evidence the same interest in A Pail of Oysters as in his other books. Although well-reviewed, it was not a popular success. Even more than Formosa Betrayed, copies of A Pail of Oysters have disappeared from most libraries, probably on instructions issued to the student spies paid by the KMT to monitor Taiwanese on US college campuses.

  (Note: Hong's speech is worth reading in its entirety.) I noticed (without surprise) that the libraries in Taiwan don't have any copies of the English original, only of the Chinese translation that was published in 2003. This book was mentioned by a couple of people I interviewed; they said they had read it before they came to Taiwan. (A website related to Taipei American School's 50th anniversary recalls the book being "passed around the foreign community in a Catcher in the Rye book jacket".) I'm really eager to start reading this one.
  

[A Pail of Oysters] [books] [Communication and Global Society] [Taiwan] [The Voice of Asia]

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Even though I'm only halfway through Cold War Orientalism right now, the post office still operates (to the extent that it operates) and two more books have found their way from various places in the U.S. (via Alibris) to my mailbox.

• Fires of the Dragon: Politics, Murder, and the Kuomintang, by David E. Kaplan (NY: Atheneum, 1992)
  This book was, I believe, recommended or listed in a posting by Michael Turton a while back. I found an inexpensive copy and got it while I could (had an e-coupon, which helped). The interesting thing about the hardback copy that I've got is that it has an American flag sticker taped to the spine and another sticker on the first page with an American flag and the name "COLONEL ELMER C. MARTIN" written below. He might have been the Elmer C. Martin, Sr. who passed away in 2000. Colonel Martin took good care of this book--it's in perfect shape.
  
  
• Transforming Agriculture in Taiwan: The Experience of the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, by Joseph A. Yager (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988)
  This one looked interesting because it's based on unpublished archival documents and covers the entire period, 1948-1979, when this US-ROC joint development agency was in operation.

[books] [Taiwan]