Choice 评论
In this valuable addition to scholarship on Asian American literature in a transnational context, Grice (Univ. of Wales, Aberystwyth) investigates four "shrouded histories of 20th century Asia"--memoirs by women of Communist China, Chinese transracial adoption narratives, literature on the geisha of Japan, and Korean expatriate narratives--that help to produce a new global imaginary by both disrupting and exceeding concepts of identity and nationhood. Also author of Maxine Hong Kingston (2006) and an introductory text on Asian American women's writing, Grice here extends the work of scholars such as Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Rocio Davis, whose transformational texts looked at Asian American literature from a diasporic and transnational perspective. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for understanding these texts as "strategic interventions in global paradigms" of nation, class, and gender. Although the author notes the need for scholarship on memoirs from Communist China, the chapter devoted to that subject offers primarily a survey of titles with little analysis. The remaining three chapters are notable for their careful discussion of the complex role of life writing as a genre that opens a discursive site of identity formation. Grice pays particular attention to the role of neo-Orientalism in the production and/or reception of these texts. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. C. Roh-Spaulding Drake University