The West in Asia and Asia in the West

This collection of new essays examines the “transnational turn” in cultural studies between Asia and the West. Drawing on literature, history, culture, film and media studies, scholars from a range of disciplines explore the constructs of “Asia” and “the West” and their cultural collision.
Topics include the relationship between European and American writers and Asia, western travelers to the East and eastern travelers to the West, transnational historic figures, the deconstruction of Orientalism, new critical perspectives in transnational studies, the immigrant experience in literature, post-colonial studies, and teaching “the West” in Asia and “Asia” in the West.

Elisabetta Marino is a tenured assistant professor of American and English literature at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata. She has published three monographs, translated poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, and edited numerous essay collections. She lives in Rome.
Tanfer Emin Tunc is an associate professor in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. She specializes in women’s and American studies and has published on Chinese American culture and literature. She lives in Ankara.

Edited by Elisabetta Marino and Tanfer Emin Tunc
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 272
Bibliographic Info: bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2015
pISBN: 978-0-7864-9473-6
eISBN: 978-1-4766-1944-6
Imprint: McFarland

Introduction 1
“Out of the Authority of the Arabians”: Orientalism and Utopian Intellectual History in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (Dan Mills) 5
The West in Afghanistan: Eighteenth–and Nineteenth-Century Colonial Ambassadors, Soldiers, and Adventurers in a Racialized “Free” Land (Zubeda Jalalzai) 20
Constructing the Other, Reconstructing Herself: A Journey Through the Crimea to Constantinople by Lady Elizabeth Craven (Elisabetta Marino) 34
History from the Middle: The ­Student-Interpreters Corps and the United States’ Understanding of Asia, 1902–1941 (Nathaniel A. Davis) 46
The Construction of a Transnational Feminist: Latife Hanım in the American Press, 1923–1925 (Tanfer Emin Tunc) 60
The West in Italy/Italy in the West: Italian American Women Writers and the Ethnic Heroine (Theodora D. Patrona) 79
Placing Ha Jin: The Crazed and Nanjing Requiem (Clara Juncker) 92
“Barbarians” in the “Promised Land”: Mona and Sterling in the City (Cristina Chevereşan) 106
A Courtesan as the “Patron Goddess of the Nation”: The Politics of an ­East-West Love Affair (Guo-ou Zhuang) 122
A Chinese Swinburne: Shao Xunmei’s Life and Art (Jicheng Sun and Harold Swindall) 133
Chinese Hopping Vampires: Reconstructing a Western Tradition in Hong Kong Cinema (Jessica Hughes) 146
Demystifying Said: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and ­Self-Orientalization as Paradigms of Power in David Mitchell’s
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Jeroen Vermeulen) 158
From Quest to Conquest: The Construction of the “East” in Angela Carter (Vrinda R. Chanth) 169
The Cosmopolitan Exile: The Dilemmas of Younghill Kang (Stephen Joyce) 179
Asian Art for U.S. College Museums: Two Pioneering Collectors, Charles Freer and Dwight Tryon (Fan Jeremy Zhang) 192
Return of the “Native”: Tales of Viet Nam in Viet Kieu (Overseas Vietnamese) Memoirs and Narratives (Nina Ha) 203
“Full-Circle” Around the Earth: Movement and the Cinematic in Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Tienfong Ho) 214
The Literature of Vietnam in Vietnam: An Undergraduate Engaged Learning Program (Alex Vernon) 224
Searching for Homo Religiosus with Mircea Eliade in India (Mihaela Gligor) 235
Marriage Ties: ­Cross-Cultural Existence in Three Indian English Films (Rituparna Das) 244
About the Contributors 255
Index 259