Search results for "Maxine Hong Kingston"
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“At the Western Palace”: The Dehumanization of Whiteness, Americanness, and Chinese-Americanness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
2021
The dehumanization of whiteness in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) inheres in the overarching ghosthood metaphor. While first generation Chinese American immigrants in The Woman Warrior attribute the power of transforming people into ghosts to the United States of America as a country, the questioning of a person’s humanity by calling them a “ghost” is not reserved for white people alone. Chinese American immigrants also run the risk of losing their humanity and becoming ghosts if they renounce their relatives and their heritage. The husband of the first-person narrator’s Chinese aunt, Moon Orchid, is an example of a Chinese American man, who turns into a ghost on account of…
Between Solid America and Fragile Chinatown in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior
2021
The article traces mixed affiliations of the narrator of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), permanently split between the world of Chinatown and broader American society outside Chinatown, both places crucial for the narrator in the on-going process of subjectivity construction. While both of these worlds constantly interpellate her, each of them entails a fair measure of hindrance and empowerment. The article undermines the criticism leveled at Kingston’s The Woman Warrior by a section of the Chinese American community represented primarily by Frank Chin. Chin accused Kingston of pandering to white tastes and white readers’ expectations of Chinese American authors. That, acco…