Taxonomizing hybridity

Textual Practice

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 357-378

  Yao, Steven G ^a  

^a HAMILTON COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

Asian American Literature; Formal Criticism; Politics; Taxonomy; Theory

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950176693     PISSN: 0950236X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0950236032000094881     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Lisa Lowe, 'Heterogeneity, hybridity, multiplicity: marking Asian American differences', Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1: 1 (spring 1991), pp. 24-44. Reprinted in Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts:On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Hereafter cited by page number in the body of the text.
2. Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 112. Hereafter cited by page number in the body of the text.
3. Lisa Lowe, 'Work, immigration, gender: Asian ''American'' women', in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 369. For a longer version of this essay, see Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics.
4. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 358-9. Hereafter cited by page number in the body of the text.
5. Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 6. Hereafter cited by page number in the body of the text.
6. Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1976), p. 1106. Hereafter cited by page number in the body of the text.
7. I owe this etymological insight toHaun Saussy. Interestingly, more conservative historical linguistics disputes this etymological relation between 'hybrid' and 'hubris'. Nevertheless, it remains a commonly held belief among classicists, which suggests the possibility of a conceptual, if not necessarily historically demonstrable, connection between the terms and the development of 'hybridity' as a term throughout various Western languages. For more information on 'hybrida' see A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Latine: Histoire des Mots (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1959), p. 302. As for the etymology of g,bo-p, the very conservative Pierre Chatraine simply notes: 'Inconnue.' See Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Grecque: Histoire des Mots (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1983) p. 1150.
8. See 'The precision of persimmons: hybridity, grafting and the case of Li-young Lee', Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory (spring 2001), pp. 1-23.
9. Li-young Lee, Rose: Poems (Brockport, NY: BOA Editions, 1986), p. 17. Hereafter cited by page number in the body of the text.
10. Marilyn Chin, Dwarf Bamboo (Greenfield, NY:Greenfield Review Press, 1987), p. 36. Hereafter cited by page number in the body of the text.
11. For further elaboration on the distribution of different character 'types' see John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), p. 84.
12. David Wong Louie, Pangs of Love: Stories (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 192.
13. Amy Tan, The Kitchen God's Wife (New York: Putnam, 1991), p. 154.
14. This essay is contained in David Palumbo-Liu's edited volume The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions and Interventions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), pp. 174-210. See especially pp. 180-3.
15. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Vintage International, 1989), p. 65.
16. For a brief summary of this debate with regard to The Woman Warrior in particular and a defence of Maxine Hong Kingston on the basis of the specifically Chinese American, as opposed simply to Chinese, thematic concerns of the work, see Sau-ling Cynthia Wong's essay, 'Autobiography as guided Chinatown tour?: Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and the Chinese American Autobiographical controversy', in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: A Casebook, ed. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 29-53.
17. Shirley Lim, 'Reconstructing Asian American poetry: a case for ethnopoetics', MELUS, 14: 2 (summer 1987), p. 53.
18. Wolfram Eberhard, A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought, trans. G.L. Campbell (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 146. Hereafter cited by page number in the body of the text.
19. Correlatively, in the Chinese literary tradition, persimmon trees embody a distinct set of seven characteristics. Himself quoting from an ancient source, a character in the great Chinese novel Xi You Ji, or Journey to the West, relates that 'There are seven types of extreme characteristics of the persimmon tree. They are: long-lasting, shady, without birds' nests, wormless, lovely leaves when frosted, hardy fruits and large luxuriant branches.' Cheng'en Wu, Journey to the West (Xi You Ji), ed. and trans. Anthony C. Yu (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977-83), p. 272.
20. Ha Jin, Between Silences: A Voice from China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 1. Hereafter cited by page number in the body of the text.
21. For just such a discussion regarding members, such as Jin, of the Chinese diaspora, see Aihwa Ong's essay 'Flexible citizenship among Chinese cosmopolitans', in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheang Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1998), pp. 134-62. For a more extended treatment of this idea see AihwaOng, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
22. For a discussion of Yau's work and the significance of its formal inventiveness as an expression of Asian American culture see Charles Altieri's article, 'Images of form vs. images of content in contemporary Asian American poetry', Qui Parle, 9: 1 (fall/winter 1995), pp. 71-91.
23. John Yau, Radiant Silhouette New and Selected Work, 1974-1988 (Santa Clara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), p. 189. Hereafter cited by page number in the body of the text.
24. John Yau, Forbidden Entries (Santa Clara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1997), p. 105.
25. For a discussion of the idea of 'translingual literary production' in a completely different context see Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and TranslatedModernity - China, 1900-1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
26. In this respect, 'mimicry' resembles such performative terms as 'ventriloquism' that have been used recently in discussions of Asian American literature. For such a discussion see Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), especially pp. 133-5.