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E-book Relative Histories : Mediating History in Asian American Family Memoirs

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Penilaian

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In general, I distinguish between four models of the kind of text gener-ally (in publishing and reviews) classified as “family memoirs”. As with all forms of literature, there are no definitive barriers between the forms I clas-sify as distinct. Part of my interest in contemporary auto/biographical writ-ing lies in how writers continually open up possibilities for self-representation through formal experimentation. Thus, the categories I propose are meant to help the reader understand particular auto/biographical projects rather than to establish prescriptive groupings.3 First, the focus of this study, what I call the “family memoir”, may be defined most clearly as narratives or films that inscribe the story of at least three generations of the same family.4 This form of auto/biography, which focuses as much on other members of one’s family as on oneself, generally collapses the boundaries we establish between biography and autobiography and, in many cases, as I argue for those of the Asian Ameri-can writing, crosses the frontier into history and promotes collective memory. These texts promote a poetics of generational progression, making the writ-ers produce the biographies of their forebears (or their children) and engag-ing the specificities of history and location for the author’s relatives. There is, thus, a significant degree of intersection between the personal and the public, generally enacted by the incorporation of substantial historical information—dates, places, names of politicians, descriptions of battles, discussion of ideo-logical commitments, and so on—to supplement the relatives’ stories. The relatives are historical actors, and the author carefully situates her forebears in their social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. The narratives thus articulate, most often chronologically, the stories of successive generations, highlighting the passage of time. In these memoirs, the stories of the author’s relatives occupy as much narrative space and importance as those of the auto/biographer. Indeed, the family stories are usually presented as independent of he author’s life; the relatives are protagonists of their own stories rather than merely characters in the writer’s life.A second type of auto/biography includes those intergenerational texts that privilege a poetics of generational simultaneity, where the author learns about or acknowledges the value of family relationships, incorporating the forebears’ influence, lessons, or legacy into her own life.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

305.8 DAV r

Penerbit

Hawaii : University of Hawai\'i Press., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

201 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780824895358

Klasifikasi

305.8

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Ethnic Groups, Ethnography, Ethnology

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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