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Introduction -- Section I: Japanese (Post)-Internment Narratives -- Against Historical Amnesia: Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine and Buddha in the Attic -- The Politics of War Memories: Remembering the Japanese Internment in Joseph Craig Danner’s The Fires of Edgarville -- Section II: The Vietnam War and Refugee Writings -- Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth: A Gothic and Liminal Narrative of Trauma -- “All Wars Were Fought Twice”: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Refugee Trauma Memories -- Section III: Postmemory and Transoceanic Coolitude -- Beyond Precarity and Trauma: Janice Lowe Shinebourne’s The Last Ship -- Post 911 Trauma in Janice Lowe Shinebourne’s Chinese Women -- In the Shadow of Modernity: The Search for Chinese Ghosts in André Lamontagne’s Les fossoyeurs: Dans le memoire de Quebec (Gravediggers). Departing from Jacques Derrida’s appropriations of cinders as a trope of war atrocity aftermath, this book examines writings that deal with war trauma memories in Asian-American communities. Seeing war experiences and their associative diasporas and affects as the core and axis, it considers the multifarious poetics and politics of minority trauma writings, and posits a possible interpretive framework for contemporary Asian-American writings, including those written by Julie Otsuka, Joseph Craig Danner, Monique Truong, Nguyen Viet Thanh, Janice Lowe Shinebourne, and Andre Lamontagne. As these writings contain works regarding Japanese-American, Indo-Chinese Guyanese, Chinese Quebeçois, Vietnamese exiles/refugees, and Vietnam-American experiences, this book presents a broad cross-cultural view on migration and minority issues triggered by wars and precarious conditions, as the diversified experiences examined here epitomize an intricate historical intimacy across four continents: Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe. Jade Tsui-yu Lee, a Fulbright alumnus, is a Professor in English Department at National Kaohsiung Normal University (NKNU), Taiwan. She obtained her doctoral degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures from National Taiwan University (NTU) with a dissertation titled “Revisionary Aesthetics/Politics: The Creole Fiction of Jean Rhys and Michelle Cliff.” The courses she regularly offers include Survey of American Literature, Literary Criticism, Contemporary English Fiction, and Asian American Literature. Her research interests include the studies of Asian American literature, contemporary British fiction, Caribbean studies, and Sino-Caribbean Diaspora.
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