Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion: Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women's Literature

by Leslie Bow

Book Overview

Asian American women have long dealt with charges of betrayal within and beyond their communities. Images of their "disloyalty" pervade American culture, from the daughter who is branded a traitor to family for adopting American ways, to the war bride who immigrates in defiance of her countrymen, to a figure such as Yoko Ono, accused of breaking up the Beatles with her "seduction" of John Lennon. Leslie Bow here explores how representations of...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691070938
• ISBN13: 9780691070933
• Release Date: June 2001
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

smart and helpful

Smart stuff. I found this book especially lucid because it nicely integrates "theory" with sharp textual readings of Asian American texts. And it's just not some static application of race or gender theory that Bow uses. She instead makes original use of different ethnic contexts, psychoanalysis, political history to bring AsAm lit into a wider theoretical context.This book is big help in thinking about what I want to do this year (my senior year!) for my thesis.

a daring book

"Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion" is a daring book. Beginning with its forceful and extended introducton, the book unsettles received expectations about cultural and literary politics. Bow argues that betrayal, like subversion, cuts both ways. What we take to be subversive (such as the works of Asian American literature she later interprets or the claims to Asian American identity themselves)might also be betrayals to principles based on *American* democracy and subject positions based on sexuality or ethnicity. And what we might take to be a betrayal of one sort of cultural identity may also work to signal strict adherence to a different sort of cultural identity.She situates her complex yet lucid readings within wide historical frames. She talks about Wendy Law Yone to initiate a wider commentary on human rights and democracy; she reads "Farewell to Manzar" to theorize the links between sexuality and citizenship; she interprets "Fifth Chinese Daughter" in ways that gesture to a larger commentary on Americanization and the Cold War. In short, I found her readings elegant. The book deploys exemplary textual readings to undertake investigations of nationalism in transnational economies (e.g. her reading of Fiona Cheong's "Scent of the Gods"), feminine sexual identity in patriarchal economies, and literary narative within academic economies indebted to the positing of resistance.