The nonaligned self : Asian redeployments of the American renaissance
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines a network of affiliations that emerged between a group of Asian American and Chinese diasporic writers and their nineteenth-century predecessors from the American Renaissance. In the twentieth century, Asian writers living in the West revived the defense of the free individual found in the Anglo-American tradition of liberalism in order to imagine new forms of provisional belonging in a pluralistic society. I draw on critical translation studies, postcolonial theory, and recent studies of the global Cold War in order to explore the links between the Asian American and Chinese diasporic traditions through their mutual commitment to redeploying ideas they encountered from the American canon. Sustained transhistorical exchanges with the literary past enabled Asian writers living in exile as well as their Asian American counterparts to articulate muted critiques of American capitalist hegemony as well as Communist repression in places like mainland China. Asian writers instrumentalized the defense of liberalism they encountered in the writings of Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Douglass in order to invent a vision of nonaligned selfhood that was global in its aspirations, even as it sought to challenge the exclusionary limits of nation-states, whether they were Communist totalitarian regimes or Western multicultural democracies.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Wang, Mai |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Jones, Gavin Roger, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Jones, Gavin Roger, 1968- |
| Thesis advisor | Fishkin, Shelley Fisher |
| Thesis advisor | Palumbo-Liu, David |
| Thesis advisor | Ruttenburg, Nancy |
| Degree committee member | Fishkin, Shelley Fisher |
| Degree committee member | Palumbo-Liu, David |
| Degree committee member | Ruttenburg, Nancy |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Mai Wang. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/mr601dw2124 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Mai Wang
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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