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Divided into two parts – the first a combination of historical introduction and theoretical analysis, the second consisting of comprehensive, in-depth, detailed close readings of representative literary works – this book is a unique bridge connecting the fields of Comparative Literature, Asian American Studies, and Asian Studies. Through a repositioning of the Chinese component of Asian America in relation to the transformations of Chinese identity in modern times, it reads Asian American literature and Asian American literary studies in the context of the historical events and geopolitical changes that have informed the construction of “Chineseness”.Drawing on feminist theory, philosophy, narratology, and semiotics, the book focuses on the body as a point of interchange between collectivity and individuality, race and culture, matter and discourse. The body, as argued here, symbolically and narratively reflects, in the texts, the encounter between Chineseness and Americanness, revealing it as a matter germane to the construction of American multiculturalism, but simultaneously informed by the broader politics of the Chinese diaspora.This book historicizes Chineseness from an ex-centric perspective, thus contributing to the understanding of its present, and re-focalizes Asian American literature from a non-US perspective, thus exploring the Asian American field with a comparative outlook. Overall, this work illuminates an aspect of the topical, and inevitably contemporary, dialogue of two major Pacific superpowers, the US and China
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