Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
Not a member yet
528 research outputs found
Sort by
An Untenable Dichotomy: The Idea of Home in John Okada’s No-No Boy
Full text linkGiven the particular history of Asian immigration in the U.S., the idea of a stable and safe home has been regularly sought after in Asian American literature. Whether these Asian immigrants abandoned their homeland due to war, famine, or other disasters, the urgency to find safety and protection in a new home in America remains one of most enduring themes. In No-No Boy, a 1957 novel by John Okada that explores the traumatic aftermath of the internment of Japanese Americans during and after World War II, the idea of home is presented in an unstable dichotomy between affirming Americanness and perpetual foreignness. The novel's protagonist Ichiro Yamada regains his freedom after serving a prison term for refusing to join the American military in the war against Japan, only to find a dysfunctional home in the back of the family grocery store. Everything here is Japanese: the food, language and allegiance. Ichiro's home is contrasted with Kenji's home, which showcases its Americanisation in every aspect. By setting up this dichotomy, Okada exposes the tension within the Japanese American community in the difficult process of assimilation into American society. The ultimate hope for Ichiro seems to lie in a home that is yet to be built, a life with Emi in an America that simply accepts him for who he is without racialisation
The Genesis of Persian and Urdu Languages and Literatures in India
Full text linkThe Indian subcontinent has contained a vast array of ethnicities, cultures, traditions and languages since the beginning of civilisation. While classical Indian civilisation was based on Sanskrit, the sacerdotal language of the Brahmins, this sacred language did not affect the general mass of people, nor literature beyond a privileged elite. The first true lingua franca that transcended caste barriers to a certain extent was Persian, which was adopted by the ruling dynasties of Muslim India (who themselves were generally Turks or indigenous Indians rather than Persians), their Hindu peers, as well as the civil servants. However, from the beginning of the seventeenth century Urdu began to form around the lower echelons of society as a pidgin common tongue to enable communication between the myriad ethnicities of the Mughal Empire, ultimately restricting Persian to a refined language of culture and courtly life in the Mughal court and becoming a vibrant and dynamic language in its own right, thus becoming the first literary language with a substantial original contribution from Indians since ancient Sanskrit. This article charts the adoption of Persian and later the emergence of Urdu as spoken and literary languages in the Indian subcontinent using original sources in those languages
“we…head back to Englishâ€: Anglophone Lyric in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines
No full textEnglish has become such a widespread international language that it has spawned Anglophone literatures in many countries. The spread of English has been one of the largely unintended benefits of empire, including in Hong Kong. For most countries the era of empire sufficiently belongs to history that literary ―postcolonial studies now seem to have largely run their course, to be replaced by the more open ―transcultural studies. This signifies the English language‘s loss of the stigma of empire as it gains a local habitation and a name. However, English often remains a minority language and a minority literature in a specific national context. These literatures are certainly minority ones in global terms, routinely ignored in the Norton, Oxford and other major anthologies of modern English literature. This makes all the more important a possible fraternity, or sorority, of such immigrant Anglophone literatures and the reading of them in relation to each other. Such writing will be, in the words of the editors of the first anthology of writing in English from South-east Asia, ―separated by distance, cultural diversity and differing historical trajectories (Patke et al, xv). What the writing will have in common are the characteristics of English, thereby encouraging an attention to the aesthetic qualities of the writing as well as the socio-political issues which have dominated literary criticism over the last fifty years in reaction against New Criticism.  This paper attempts such a glocal study through a comparison of the work of established contemporary poets from Hong Kong, Singapore and The Philippines, each an Asian place with a recent but now strong enough Anglophone poetry to mark the foundations of a tradition. For practical purposes, this is a sample of countries and of poets, the three being Agnes Lam (Hong Kong), Kirpal Singh (Singapore) and Isabela Banzon (The Philippines)