Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature

by Yunte Huang

Yunte Huang takes a most original "ethnographic" approach to more and less well-known American texts as he traces what he calls the transpacific displacement of cultural meanings through twentieth-century America's imaging of Asia.

Informed by the politics of linguistic appropriation and disappropriation, Transpacific Displacement opens with a radically new reading of Imagism through the work of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. Huang relates Imagism to earlier linguistic ethnographies of Asia and to racist representations of Asians in American pop culture, such as the book and movie character Charlie Chan, then shows that Asian American writers subject both literary Orientalism and racial stereotyping to double ventriloquism and countermockery. Going on to offer a provocative critique of some textually and culturally homogenizing tendencies exemplified in Maxine Hong Kingston's work and its reception, Huang ends with a study of American translations of contemporary Chinese poetry, which he views as new ethnographies that maintain linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Genres: Theory

226 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Yunte Huang a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Transpacific Imaginations and Charlie Chan. Born in China, he lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Reviews

[Nathanael Booth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Huang examines the ways in which Chinese writing—poetry, to be precise—is treated in American literature. He begins with Pound and discusses how Pound’s reading of Chinese poetry—and Chinese writing, as in the characters—play into both Pound’s efforts to construct a new American poetry and his pre-determined attempts to get at an “essential” Chinese-ness. Huang then traces this trajectory through other Imagist poets as well as the writings of Maxine Hong Kingston and contemporary translations of Chinese poetry. In these last two, he demonstrates that “China” is no more “authentic” for them than it was for Pound; in each case, the material-historical reality of China is replaced with a monolithic and quasi-mythical Idea. His end-game is to re-situate American literature in a trans-Pacific context, in which thematics and cultural signifiers are appropriated and re-appropriated, leading him to three conclusions:

1. That American literature should properly be understood as transnational
2. That American literature should be accepted as multilingual
3. That American literature should be re-conceptualized in terms of trans-Pacific exchange

Huang is a convincing, charming, and charitable critic, and for the most part his points land. His insistence on not reading these texts through a pre-determined theoretical lens is refreshing and allows him to both critique writers such as Pound and appreciate these writers’ projects. If his concluding remarks regarding translations seem too much like a sales pitch (he praises Ping Want’s "New Generation," and is clearly working from early drafts of her book), this is a minor enough quibble.

He also writes very well. This book is a pleasure to read.