Suchergebnisse

The literary topic of Siamese twins is not unfamiliar. American literary history tells us of the genealogy from Mark Twain's pseudo-antebellum story The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), Karen Tei Yamashita's postmodern metafiction "Siamese Twins and Mongoloids: Cultural Appropriation and the Deconstruction of Stereotype via the Absurdity of Metaphor" (1999), down to Shelley Jackson's James Tiptree, Jr. award winner Half-Life (2006). Rereading these works, we are easily invited to notice the political unconscious hidden deep within each plot: Twain's selection of the Italian Siamese twins based upon Chang and Eng Bunker, antebellum stars of the Barnum Museum, cannot help but recall the ideal of the post-Civil War world uniting the North and the South; Yamashita's figure of the conjoined twins Heco and Okada derives from Hikozo Hamada, an antebellum Japanese who made every effort to empower the bond between Japan and the United States, and John Okada, the Japanese American writer well known for his masterpiece No No Boy (1957); and Jackson's characterization of the female conjoined twins Nora and Blanche Olney represents a new civil rights movement in the post-Cold War age in the near future, establishing a close friendship between the humans and the post-humans. This literary and cultural context should convince us that Yamashita's short story "Siamese Twins and Mongoloids" serves as a kind of singularity point between realist twins and magic realist twins. Influenced by Twain's twins, Yamashita paves the way for the re-figuration of the conjoined twins not only as tragi-comical freaks in the Gilded Age but also as representative men of magic realist America in our Multiculturalist Age. A Close reading of this metafiction composed in a way reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges, Stanislaw Lem and Bruce Sterling will enable us to rediscover not only the role conjoined twins played in cultural history, but also the reason why Yamashita had to feature them once again in her novel I Hotel (2010) whose plot centers around the Asian American civil rights movement between the 1960s and the 1970s. Accordingly, an Asian American magic realist perspective will clarify the way Yamashita positioned the figure of Siamese Twins as representing legal and political double standards, and the way the catachresis of Siamese Twins came to be naturalized, questioned and dismissed in American literary history from the 19th century through the 21st century.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- List of contributors -- Preface -- Introduction: Recognizing Transnational American Studies -- Note -- Bibliography -- 1. Collaboration in Transnational American Studies -- Introduction -- Coda -- Notes -- Bibliography -- PART I: Theorizing Transnational American Studies -- 2. Reorienting the transnational: Transatlantic, transpacific, and antipodean -- Introduction -- Notes -- Bibliography -- 3. Worlding America and Transnational American Studies -- Introduction -- Transnational American Studies as relational studies -- Transnational connectivity and the early Americas -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- 4. Archipelagic American Studies: An open and comparative insularity -- Introduction -- Notes -- Bibliography -- 5. The transnational poetics of Edward Said: Dangerous affiliations and impossible comparisons -- Introduction -- Notes -- Bibliography -- 6. The Pacific turn: Transnational Asian American Studies -- Boundaries, history, and debates -- The transnational turn, the immigrant, and US imperialism -- US-centric approaches and Japanese imperialism -- The polycentric transpacific -- Notes -- Bibliography -- PART II: Culture and performance: Histories and reciprocities -- 7. Cultural performance and Transnational American Studies -- Concepts and crossroads -- Antebellum African American performances of August 1 -- German-American encounters and epistemologies of embodied performance -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- 8. The Barbary frontier and transnational allegories of freedom -- Introduction -- Refashioning Barbary -- The Barbary frontier in American drama -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- 9. Stages of crossing: Transnational Indigenous futures -- Acts of mapping: Cambodia/Kassel.

American culture has been one of the most controversial exports of the United States: greeted with enthusiasm by some, with hostility by others. Yet, few societies escape its influence. However, not all changes should be interpreted simply as "Americanization." The shaping of the postwar world has been much more complex than this term implies as is shown in this volume that explores the links between Americanization and modernity in Western Europe and Japan. In considering the impact of products and images ranging from movies and music to fashion and architecture, a multi-disciplinary group of contributors asks how American culture has been employed internationally in the articulation of postwar identities - be they national or subnational,socially sanctioned or socially transgressive. Their essays on France, Italy, Germany and Japan move beyond the simple paradigms of colonization and democratic modernization, yet retain a sensitivity to the asymmetries in the postwar power relationships between these countries and the United States. An extensive introduction historically locates changing interpretations of American influences abroad and suggests the problems and promises of "Americanization" as an analytical tool. Its comparative focus and interdisciplinary scope will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars of cold war and post-cold war history