​Seminar| Maxine Hong Kingston and Transpacific American Studies

"In reading The Fifth Book of Peace in juxtaposition with The Woman Warrior, I argue that Maxine Hong Kingston has developed a new paradigm of transpacific American studies by situating the multiplicity of her Chinese American identity in transpacific movements and also by reinventing a new Chinese American epistemology in the process of intervening in US imperialism around the globe. Such efforts substantiate what Mignolo advocates as "global decolonial thinking," a critical process that seeks to reclaim non-Western notions of humanity, to validate an indigenous sense of epistemology, as well as to legitimate an alternative system of knowledge production and circulation."

Yuan Shu is an associate professor of English and director of the Asian Studies Program at Texas Tech University. His research interests include transpacific American studies and globalization theory, technology and discourse, as well as critical and comparative race studies. He has published essays in journals varying from Cultural Critique to MELUS. He has co-edited two essay volumes, American Studies as Transnational Practice (Dartmouth College Press, 2015) and Oceanic Archives and Transpacific American Studies (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). His current project, on Empire and Geopolitics: Technology, Transpacific Movements, and Chinese American Writing, is under contract with a university press. He served as a Fulbright scholar at the National University of Singapore from 2017 to 2018.  

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