Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- 29 The 9/11 of Our Imaginations: Islam, the Figure of the Muslim, and the Failed Liberalism of the Racial Present
- 30 Narrating War: Arab and Muslim American Aesthetics
- 31 Thick Time and Space: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Aesthetics
- 32 Asian American New Media as Literature for the Digital Age
- 33 Beyond National Literatures: Empire and Amitav Ghosh
- Bibliography
- Index
31 - Thick Time and Space: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Aesthetics
from Part VI - Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2015
By
Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- 29 The 9/11 of Our Imaginations: Islam, the Figure of the Muslim, and the Failed Liberalism of the Racial Present
- 30 Narrating War: Arab and Muslim American Aesthetics
- 31 Thick Time and Space: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Aesthetics
- 32 Asian American New Media as Literature for the Digital Age
- 33 Beyond National Literatures: Empire and Amitav Ghosh
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There are arguably few writers whose work compels to recognize features of Asian American literary studies as powerfully as does Karen Tei Yamashita. Her work not only elucidates the preoccupation of Asian American literary studies with spatial thinking, but also exemplifies a playful critical curiosity that manifests through formal experimentation and an unusually capacious imagination. Yamashita thickens time and space such that the depth and breadth of the material grounds that form the conditions of possibility for life and thought are brought to bear on the apprehension of present circumstances. As Asian American literature became established as a category of literary criticism in the closing decades of the twentieth century, it came to reflect Asian American studies' commitments to the pursuit of social justice and the eradication of inequality. In sharp contrast to commonplace understandings of aesthetics as delinked from politics or questions of material equality, Yamashita's work exemplifies the worldliness of aesthetics.
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- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature , pp. 535 - 550Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
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