Asian Heritage Month Highlight: Nonfiction May 24, 2019 – Posted in: Highlights – Tags: Asian Heritage Month, Nonfiction
Today, we’re featuring some great nonfcition titles for Asian Heritage Month. From memoirs to essays, you’re bound to discover a new favourite author – perhaps even a new favourite book! Make sure to click the title names below for more information.
Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in English (Literary Criticism): From unappreciated railway workers facing institutional racism and neglect in the last century to national cultural figures of the present, the Chinese, like other coloured peoples of Canada, have made great inroads into the mainstream, which in turn has adjusted its self-image to accommodate diversity.
Dark Antonyms and Paradise: The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz (Literary Criticism): The poetry and prose of Rienzi Crusz are about many things–exile, identity, family, religion, politics, and racism and finally death–and this work is an attempt to demonstrate that the various facets are a result of a holistic vision that transcends narrow labels.
The Texture of Identity: The Fiction of M G Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry (Literary Criticism): Arguing that globalization is no longer a term defining only international cash flow but also includes the flow and exchange of cultures, this book examines the works of three major Canadian writers of South Asian origin and born in three different parts of the world–MG Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry.
Once Upon a Time in Bollywood: The Global Swing in Hindi Cinema (Essays): Once Upon a Time in Bollywood presents an extravaganza of essays on globalization and contemporary Hindi cinema. For connoisseurs and critics of Hindi cinema alike, this collection presents stirring insights into popular culture.
Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space (Essays): In these closely argued essays, taking examples from writing and film, Mukherjee considers the place of the third world person – both as artistic creator and as a subject of artistic endeavour – in the West.
Shadows of the Crimson Sun: One Man’s Life in Manchuria, Taiwan, and North America (Biography & Memoir): In 1945, fourteen-year-old Akihisa Takayama escapes with his family to their ancestral Taiwan. Here they find themselves under the brutal Chinese dictatorship of the Kuomintang. Now in the 1960s, now a physician calling himself Charles Yang, he escapes with his young family to the United States, from where they finally go on to Canada to become among the first Taiwanese Canadians in Vancouver. Charles Yang’s experiences illuminate the “White Terror” of Taiwan, and the geopolitical dispute between Communist China and Taiwan over the meaning of “One China.”
History and Imagination: Tamil Culture in the Global Context (History & Criticism): This collection of essays covers a broad range of topics concerning Tamil culture all over the world. Tamils, originating in South India and Sri Lanka, constitute a large part of the diasporic South Asians in Canada, as well as the United States, Australia, and Europe.
Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short Story Cycles (Literary Criticism): This study analyzes the manner in which important Asian American and Asian Canadian writers appropriate the short-story cycle as a tool for both self-representation and empowerment. This work specifically analyzes a number of major works by writers such as Amy Tan, Rohinton Mistry, Sara Suleri, Garrett Hongo, Terry Watada,Sylvia Watanabe, MG Vassanji, and Wayson Choy, among others.
Transnational Poetics: Asian Canadian Women’s Fiction of the 1990s (Literary Criticism): This substantial book examines the fiction of Asian Canadian women writers–Indian, Chinese, and Japanese–of the 1990s, specifically how their work reveals their self-perception as members of minority subcultures.
World Without Walls: Being Human, Being Tamil (Literary Criticism): The essays in this volume offer a nuanced view of “Being Human; Being Tamil” in the context of South Asia and the diaspora. They explore the multiple ways of being Tamil, and the cultural, religious, and poetic linkages that have contributed to the emergence and articulation of Tamilness in a global context.