Synopses & Reviews
Does "Asian American" denote an ethnic or racial identification? Is a person of mixed ancestry, the child of Euro- and Asian American parents, Asian American? What does it mean to refer to first generation Hmong refugees and fifth generation Chinese Americans both as Asian American?
In Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation State, Robert Chang examines the current discourse on race and law and the implications of postmodern theory and affirmative action-all of which have largely excluded Asian Americans-in order to develop a theory of critical Asian American legal studies.
Demonstrating that the ongoing debate surrounding multiculturalism and immigration in the U.S. is really a struggle over the meaning of "America," Chang reveals how the construction of Asian American-ness has become a necessary component in stabilizing a national American identity-- a fact Chang criticizes as harmful to Asian Americans. Defining the many "borders" that operate in positive and negative ways to construct America as we know it, Chang analyzes the position of Asian Americans within America's black/white racial paradigm, how "the family" operates as a stand-in for race and nation, and how the figure of the immigrant embodies a central contradiction in allegories of America.
"Has profound political implications for race relations in the new century"
Michigan Law Review, May 2001
Review
"Beware all those who enter here. Anderson's remarkable first book...is like an outcropping of hell--the reader is compelled by fascination and horror to keep reading...Anderson's life force is implicit in the language throughout these poems, objective, exact, charged with an emotional force given only to those who have been to hell and returned to tell the tale." -Publishers Weekly,
Review
"Has profound political implications for race relations in the new century."-Michigan Law Review,
Review
"Sophisticated and passionate . . . As [Robert Chang] says, our world is now 'bursting with color' and it is his accomplishment in this book to re-theorize the vocabulary within which questions of race are debated in this society."-Stanley Fish,University of Illinois, Chicago
Synopsis
Human Nature explores, both seductively and horrificly, the redemptive possibilities found in an American girlhood gone wrong. Every one of Anderson's poems tells a storydangerous, sensuous, sometimes crazy, sometimes sacred tales that take us into the heartbreaking reality and strangeness of a little girl who grew up the woman of the house; at once drink-maker, showpiece, secret-keeper, and object of lust.
The terrain of incest and violence sets itself out on the page so subtely and plainly that the poems become mere containers for these extremes, a kind of prayer. Where formal grace might seem impossible, Anderson sings. And this is why the book with all its darkness and dangeris, in the end, an affirmative one. The poems rise out of childhood's sorrows into a womanhood filled with the past, hell-bent on the future, and ready for a fight. In haunting, elegant verse, Anderson enters into the truth of experience. Through it all, the poems come to embrace those universal illuminations that arise out of--or even because of--suffering.
About the Author
Alice Anderson was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1966. She holds a BA in English from California State University, Sacramento, and an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. She has lived in Paris, Geneva, Milan, and Osaka, and is currently residing in Northern California.