Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics

by Yunte Huang

Overview

Transpacific Imaginations is a study of how American literature is enmeshed with the literatures of Asia. The book begins with Western encounters with the Pacific: Yunte Huang reads Moby Dick as a Pacific work, looks at Henry Adams’s not talking about his travels in Japan and the Pacific basin in his autobiography, and compares Mark Twain to Liang Qichao. Huang then turns to Asian American encounters with the Pacific, concentrating on the "Angel Island" poems and on works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Araki Yasusada.

Huang’s argument that the Pacific forms American literature more than is generally acknowledged is a major contribution to our understanding of literary history. The book is in dialogue with cross-cultural studies of the Pacific and with contemporary innovative poetics. Huang has found a vehicle to join Asians and Westerners at the deepest level, and that vehicle is poetry. Poets can best imagine an ethical ground upon which different people join hands. Huang asks us to contribute to this effort by understanding the poets and writers already in the process of linking diverse peoples.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674026377
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	02/28/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	202
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Yunte Huang is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Transpacific Displacement.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Transpacific as a Critical Space

Part I: History: And the Views from the Shores

1. Mark Twain: Letters from Hawaii

2. Henry Adams: In Japan and the South Seas

3. Liang Qichao: A Journey to the New Continent

Part II: Literature: Moby-Dick in the Pacific

4. Collecting in the Pacific

5. Ahab's Collectibles: The White Whale and the Yellow Tigers

6. Ishmael, a Pacific Historian

7. Queequeg, the Pacific Man

8. Melville's Pacific Becoming: Fancy, Fate, Finis

Part III: Counterpoetics: Islands, Legends, Maps

9. The Poetics of Error: Angel Island

10. Legends from Camp: Lawson Fusao Inada

11. Mapping Histories: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Conclusion: Between History and Literature—A Poetics of Acknowledgment

Notes

Index

What People are Saying About This

From the wake of a great white whale to the flatness of internment camp conversation, from commercial inventories to contemporary lyrics haunted by inauthenticity, Yunte Huang's Transpacific Imaginations shows that ocean to be a criss-crossing field of inscriptions. Reading them together, in their intersection, is his task here. It is a book not easily put back in its bottle.

Rob Wilson

This is a splendid, sharp, and trenchantly coherent study that will make an important intervention into American cultural studies, trans-Pacific Asia studies, and ethnic minority studies in ways that will alter how we now understand global and local dimensions of the American nation and Asia area-based disciplinary formations. Huang writes with disciplinary range and critical lucidity as well as an elegance of theoretical formulation that cannot be denied. Exploring a range of unexpected topics from Captain Ahab's collections to Angel Island poems to the faux-Hiroshima dossier of Yasusada, Transpacific Imaginations is an outstanding work in all respects.
— Rob Wilson, author of Reimagining the American Pacific and American Sublime

Haun Saussy

From the wake of a great white whale to the flatness of internment camp conversation, from commercial inventories to contemporary lyrics haunted by inauthenticity, Yunte Huang's Transpacific Imaginations shows that ocean to be a criss-crossing field of inscriptions. Reading them together, in their intersection, is his task here. It is a book not easily put back in its bottle.
— Haun Saussy, Yale University

Juliana Spahr

Huang's book breaks new ground. Its desire to highlight the Pacific and its argument that the Pacific forms American literature more than is often acknowledged is both unusual and crucial and convincing. It covers old territory in news ways, and it brings attention to newish territory. Transpacific Imaginations will be a valuable asset to those interested in Pacific studies, Asian-American literature, and poetics.

— Juliana Spahr, author of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems

Wen Jin

Transpacific Imaginations is an extraordinary study. It's hard to recall another book that covers a wider and more uneven discursive terrain than this one. The best way to describe the manuscript, perhaps, is to appropriate one of its own central metaphors: collection. This is a wonderful addition to the emerging field of transpacific studies.
— Wen Jin, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Editorial Reviews

From the wake of a great white whale to the flatness of internment camp conversation, from commercial inventories to contemporary lyrics haunted by inauthenticity, Yunte Huang’s Transpacific Imaginations shows that ocean to be a criss-crossing field of inscriptions. Reading them together, in their intersection, is his task here. It is a book not easily put back in its bottle.

Haun Saussy

Huang’s book breaks new ground. Its desire to highlight the Pacific and its argument that the Pacific forms American literature more than is often acknowledged is both unusual and crucial and convincing. It covers old territory in news ways, and it brings attention to newish territory. Transpacific Imaginations will be a valuable asset to those interested in Pacific studies, Asian-American literature, and poetics.

Juliana Spahr

This is a splendid, sharp, and trenchantly coherent study that will make an important intervention into American cultural studies, trans-Pacific Asia studies, and ethnic minority studies in ways that will alter how we now understand global and local dimensions of the American nation and Asia area-based disciplinary formations. Huang writes with disciplinary range and critical lucidity as well as an elegance of theoretical formulation that cannot be denied. Exploring a range of unexpected topics from Captain Ahab’s collections to Angel Island poems to the faux-Hiroshima dossier of Yasusada, Transpacific Imaginations is an outstanding work in all respects.

Rob Wilson

Transpacific Imaginations is an extraordinary study. It’s hard to recall another book that covers a wider and more uneven discursive terrain than this one. The best way to describe the manuscript, perhaps, is to appropriate one of its own central metaphors: collection. This is a wonderful addition to the emerging field of transpacific studies.

Wen Jin