National Taiwan Normal University Repository

Kate Chiwen Liu

 
 
 
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 39.2 
September 2013: 109-118 
DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.2013.39.2.07 
 
An Outsider’s Perspectives on 
Asian Canadian Studies: 
A Response to Donald Goellnicht 
 
Kate Chiwen Liu 
Department of English 
Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan 
 
 
It is my great honor to have been invited to respond to Donald Goellnicht’s 
paper, which delineates the ongoing formation of Asian Canadian studies in ways 
quite different from those of Asian American studies. Looking at the title of his 
paper—“Outside the U.S. Frame: Asian Canadian Perspectives”—I have wondered 
whether perhaps I should call my response as “Outside the ‘Asian Canadian’ Frame: 
‘Taiwanese’ Perspectives.” However, I have decided that it makes more sense to 
respond  to  the  issue  of  “Asian  Canadian”  more  generally  from  an  “outsider’s” 
position.    After defining this position, I will first discuss the necessity of “Asian 
Canadian studies” as an institution, and then explain that it is equally productive to 
see  “Asian  Canadian”  as  a  diasporic  space  of  communication  and  of  multiple 
intersections that can be extended outward. 
Different situations or positions will indeed make us situate Asian Canadian 
studies rather differently. For Goellnicht, one of the major academics involved in 
carving out Asian Canadian studies as a discipline, mapping its terrain and forming 
its canon matter, as does its visibility as a distinct academic subject. Therefore, for 
him, “[one] institutional challenge that anyone teaching Asian Canadian literature in 
Canada  faces  is  the  already-existing  incorporation  of  South  Asian  material  into 
courses  that  were  initially  labelled  ‘Commonwealth  Literature’  (i.e.,  the  British 
Commonwealth) and later ‘Postcolonial Literature’” (90). On the other hand, for 
myself as a student, researcher and teacher of Canadian postcolonial literature in 
Taiwan, putting Asian Canadian texts in a broader context, without losing their 
socio-historical specificities, is a matter of necessity. When I was first assigned to 
conduct Canadian postcolonial studies as part of a research team, I strategically 
chose  to  study  postcolonial  texts  from  the  perspectives  of  three  ethnic 

English

An Outsider’s Perspectives on Asian Canadian Studies: A Response to Donald Goellnicht

Gayle K. Sato

 
 
 
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 39.2 
September 2013: 119-135 
DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.2013.39.2.08 
 
Post-Redress Memory: 
A Personal Reflection on Manzanar Murakami 
 
Gayle K. Sato 
School of Arts and Letters 
Meiji University, Japan 
 
Abstract 
This is a revised version of a talk whose original objective was to reflect on my 
past work in the area of Japanese American internment narratives, in particular on 
one essay entitled “The Transpacific Gaze in Tropic of Orange,” in which I show 
how the character named Manzanar Murakami, through an arduous process of 
voluntary  homelessness,  traumatic  amnesia,  and  spectacular  performance  art, 
transforms his Japanese American subjectivity from being an absent presence in 
U.S. society to one that can consciously carry an ineradicable painful memory of 
internment while retaining a vital sense of being at home in America. In reflecting 
on this paper, I recalled the long process of my coming to recognize a new mode 
of  internment  memory  which,  emerging  after  the  Redress  movement  had 
concluded victoriously, pointed to what was missing in extant literary narratives 
of internment memory. I gave the name “post-Redress internment memory” to 
this new mode of remembering. My talk on “The Transpacific Gaze in Tropic of 
Orange,” expanded and amended, is incorporated here as the second and third 
sections of the present paper. A first section was added in order to situate post-
Redress memory within the rubric of “phantom Asian America,” and a fourth 
section  was  added  to  recapitulate  my  argument  in  a  different  context—the 
necessity of a fully engaged and pleasurable sensory apparatus for the work of 
literary criticism and the teaching of critical war memory. 
 
Keywords 
Japanese American internment, Manzanar, Redress movement, post-Redress memory, 
sensory apparatus, trauma narratives, Tropic of Orange 
 

Post-Redress Memory: A Personal Reflection on Manzanar Murakami

Michaela Keck

 
 
 
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 39.2 
September 2013: 139-161 
DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.2013.39.2.09 
 
Complicating the Reading of Nineteenth-Century 
American Landscape Painting: Albert Bierstadt’s 
Western Visions, Aesthetics, and Sociology 
 
Michaela Keck 
Institute for English/American Studies 
Carl von Ossietzky University, Germany 
 
Abstract 
Albert Bierstadt’s panoramic landscapes have always polarized the general 
public,  critics,  and  scholars.  For  some,  they  represent  the  wonders  of  an 
exceptional natural world and society; for others they express the disturbing, 
megalomaniac history of nineteenth-century American conquest. While such 
binary opposites are overly simplistic, they have continued to shape the public 
and scholarly debate regarding representations of American nature. Based on 
the notion of an aesthetic perception of nature as landscape, and on sociologist 
Norbert Elias’s figurational conception of the “involvement and detachment” 
between human spectators and nature, this article will explore the multilayered, 
heterogeneous cultural forces at work in Toward the Setting Sun (1862) and 
The Oregon Trail (1869). The contesting forces inherent in Toward the Setting 
Sun will be examined in the light of Bierstadt’s transcultural walking figure, 
while  the  different  situational  negotiations  of  American  and  European 
readings  will  help  to  shed  light  on  The  Oregon  Trail.  I  will  argue  that 
Bierstadt’s Indian walking figure in  Toward the Setting Sun  represents the 
aesthetic  experience  of  nature  as  landscape,  as  well  as  the  protest  against 
growing social pressures within a wider social context, and Bierstadt’s desire 
to market his art on the level of the individual. To Americans, The Oregon 
Trail likewise expresses social anxieties insofar as it reveals the aggressive 
capitalism of the Gilded Age and the dictates of the international marketplace. 
To Europeans, however, it promises a secure, independent life removed from 
war-plagued social conditions and economic deprivation. 
 
Keywords 
nineteenth-century American landscape painting, Albert Bierstadt, aesthetics, sociology 
Norbert Elias, involvement, detachment 
 

Complicating the Reading of Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting: Albert Bierstadt’s Western Visions, Aesthetics, and Sociology

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