Book picks similar to
Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds by Stephen Hong Sohn


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World's Great Men of Color, Volume II


J.A. Rogers - 1972
    In this first volume: outstanding blacks of Asia and Africa, and historical figures before Christ -- including Akhenaton, Aesop, Hannibal, Cleopatra, Zenobia, Askia the Great, the Mahdi, Samuel Adjai Crowther, and many more. World's Great Men of Color is a comprehensive account of the great Black personalities in world history. J. A. Rogers was one of the first Black scholars to devote most of his life to researching the lives of hundreds of men and women of color. This first volume is a convenient reference; equipped with a comprehensive introduction, it treats all aspects of recorded Black history. J. A. Rogers's book is vital reading for everyone who wants a fuller and broader understanding of the great personalities who have shaped our world. The companion volume covers the great Blacks of Europe, South and Central America, the West Indies, and the United States, including Marcus Garvey, Robert Browning, Dom Pedro, Alexandre Dumas, Joachim Murat, Aleksander Sergeevich Pushkin, Alessandro de' Medici, St. Benedict the Moor, and many others.

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature


Erich Auerbach - 1942
    A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics.A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote "Mimesis," publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours. For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, "Mimesis" is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written.

Empathy and Eyebrows: A Survivalist's Stories on Reviving Your Spirit After Soul-Crushing Sh*tstorms


Danni Starr - 2017
    

Royals of Villain Academy: Books 5 - 8


Eva Chase - 2020
    Four impossible loves. Can we conjure a happy ending?I was starting to think I knew what I was dealing with at the university best known as Villain Academy. I’d come to believe that by owning my role as the last remaining Bloodstone, I could change this place for the better. Then a series of shocking revelations turns everything I believed on its head.The other scions have my back now, with all the trouble that's brought them. How much more will they have to sacrifice before we can find some kind of peace? I'm ready to fight for my newfound life, my family, and the guys I'm falling for... but this battle may bring more casualties than I can bear.Do I have the defiance in me to overthrow centuries of magical tyranny? Looks like it’s time to find out.*Royals of Villain Academy is a university-age paranormal academy series. Expect magical villainy, a tough heroine who bends to no one’s will, a dollop of steam, and a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers romance where the men discover the joys of sharing.*Enjoy over 1200 pages of excitement in one box set! This set contains the final four books in the Royals of Villain Academy series—Corrupt Alchemy, Foul Conjuring, Grim Witchery, and Vicious Arts—plus 30+ pages of exclusive bonus scenes.

Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown


Lauren Hilgers - 2018
    Hello, Lauren! a man shouted in halting Mandarin. We might be seeing you in New York again soon! The voice belonged to Zhuang Liehong, a Chinese man who had been arrested in his home country for leading a string of protests, and whom Hilgers had met the previous year while reporting a story. Despite zero contacts and a shaky grasp of English, Zhuang explained that he and his wife, Little Yan, had a plan to escape from their American tour group and move to Flushing, Queens, to escape persecution back home. A few weeks later, they arrived on Hilgers's doorstep. With a novelistic eye for character and detail, Hilgers weaves their story with a larger investigation of the Chinese community in Flushing, one of the fastest-growing immigrant enclaves in the US. There's Tang Yuanjun, a former Tiananmen Square leader who has come to terms with living a shadow life in America as his friends and family continue their own in China. And Karen, one of Little Yan's friends from night school, who was kidnapped by her relatives yet remains hopeful, working part-time in a nail salon as she attends vocational school for hotel work. Patriot Number One is Hilgers's nuanced, through-the-looking-glass story of the twenty-first-century American dream. Zhuang and Little Yan's challenges reveal a world hidden in plain sight: the byzantine network of employment agencies and language schools, of underground banks and illegal dormitories that allow immigrants to survive. Amid a raging immigration debate on the national stage, Hilgers's deeply reported and beautifully wrought account paints a revealing portrait of just what it takes to survive.

No-No Boy


John Okada - 1956
    He attended the University of Washington and Columbia University. He served in the US Army in World War II, wrote one novel and died of a heart attack at the age of 47. John Okada died in obscurity believing that Asian America had rejected his work. In this work, Okada gives the perspective of a no-no boy, a Japanese-American man who would neither denounce his Japanese heritage nor fight for the U.S. Army during WWII. This novel takes place after the main character spent two years in a Japanese internment camp, and two years in prison after saying no when asked to join the U.S. Army. Okada's novel No-No Boy shows the internal and external struggles fought by Japanese-Americans in that time period, be they no-no boys or not.

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge


Jean-François Lyotard - 1979
    Many definitions of postmodernism focus on its nature as the aftermath of the modern industrial age when technology developed. This book extends that analysis to postmodernism by looking at the status of science, technology, and the arts, the significance of technocracy, and the way the flow of information is controlled in the Western world.

Modernism


Peter Childs - 2000
    The author explains the pan-European origins of the radical literary changes which occurred in the novel, poetry and drama, as well as the many revolutions in art, film and aesthetic theory.

The Woman Warrior


Maxine Hong Kingston - 1976
    A Chinese American woman tells of the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity.

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time


Ira Katznelson - 2013
    Ira Katznelson, “a towering figure in the study of American and European history” (Cornel West), boldly asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern lawmakers who safeguarded racial segregation as they built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power. This original study brings to vivid life the politicians and pundits of the time, including Walter Lippmann, who argued that America needed a dose of dictatorship; Mississippi’s five-foot-two Senator Theodore Bilbo, who advocated the legal separation of races; and Robert Oppenheimer, who built the atomic bomb yet was tragically undone by the nation’s hysteria. Fear Itself is a necessary work, vital to understanding our world—a world the New Deal first made.

Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway ... and More


Russell Simmons - 2003
    Among them: Suheir Hammad, Beau Sia, Steve Colman, Stacyann Chin, Mayda del Valle, Georgia Me, Poetri, and other well-established and up-and-coming Slam artists who have forever changed the face of poetry and offer a fresh, exuberant, insightful, and comedic look at who we are as Americans today.

Belonging: A Culture of Place


bell hooks - 2004
    Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which hooks moves from place to place, from country to city and back again, only to end where she began--her old Kentucky home. hooks has written provocatively about race, gender, and class; and in this book she turns her attention to focus on issues of land and land ownership. Reflecting on the fact that 90% of all black people lived in the agrarian South before mass migration to northern cities in the early 1900s, she writes about black farmers, about black folks who have been committed both in the past and in the present to local food production, to being organic, and to finding solace in nature. Naturally, it would be impossible to contemplate these issues without thinking about the politics of race and class. Reflecting on the racism that continues to find expression in the world of real estate, she writes about segregation in housing and economic racialized zoning. In these critical essays, hooks finds surprising connections that link the environment and sustainability to the politics of race and class that reach far beyond Kentucky.With characteristic insight and honesty, Belonging offers a remarkable vision of a world where all people--wherever they may call home--can live fully and well, where everyone can belong.

Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure


René Girard - 1961
    In considering such aspects, the author goes beyond the domain of pure aesthetics and offers an interpretation of some basic cultural problems of our time.

Discourse on Colonialism


Aimé Césaire - 1950
    Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and antiwar movements. Aimé Césaire eloquently describes the brutal impact of capitalism and colonialism on both the colonizer and colonized, exposing the contradictions and hypocrisy implicit in western notions of "progress" and "civilization" upon encountering the "savage," "uncultured," or "primitive." He reaffirms African values, identity, and culture, and their relevance, reminding us that "the relationship between consciousness and reality is extremely complex. . . . It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society." An interview with Aimé Césaire by the poet René Depestre is also included.

Letters to Memory


Karen Tei Yamashita - 2017
    . . . Intriguing." —Library Journal"This powerful, deeply felt, and impeccably researched fiction is irresistibly evocative." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)Scintillations is an excursion through the Japanese internment using archival materials from the Yamashita family as well as a series of epistolary conversations with composite characters representing a range of academic specialties. Historians, anthropologists, classicists—their disciplines, and Yamashita's engagement with them, are a way for her explore various aspects of the internment and to expand its meaning beyond her family, and our borders, to ideas of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, Orientalism, and community.Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Brazil-Maru, Tropic of Orange, Circle K Cycles, I Hotel, and Anime Wong, all published by Coffee House Press. I Hotel was selected as a finalist for the National Book Award and awarded the California Book Award, the American Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association Award, and the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award.