Cultural Studies

Asian American X edited by Arar Han and John Y. Hsu

Jewish in America edited by Sara B. Blair and Jonathan E. Freedman

Untimely Interventions by Ross Chambers

Asian American X: An Intersection of Twenty-First Century Asian American Voices

Arar Han and John Y. Hsu, Editors

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

"This diverse collection, like Asian America itself, adds up to something far more vibrant than the sum of its voices."
—Eric Liu, author of The Accidental Asian

"There's fury, dignity, and self-awareness in these essays. I found the voices to be energetic and the ideas exciting."
—Diana Son, playwright (Stop Kiss) and co-producer (Law & Order: Criminal Intent)

This refreshing and timely collection of coming-of-age essays, edited and written by young Asian Americans, powerfully captures the joys and struggles of their evolving identities as one of the fastest-growing groups in the nation and poignantly depicts the many oft-conflicting ties they feel to both American and Asian cultures. The essays also highlight the vast cultural diversity within the category of Asian American, yet ultimately reveal how these young people are truly American in their ideals and dreams.

Asian American X is more than a book on identity; it is required reading both for young Asian Americans who seek to understand themselves and their social group, and for all who are interested in keeping abreast of the changing American social terrain.

Arar Han is a recent graduate of Boston College.

John Y. Hsu is a recent graduate of Harvard University.

August 2004
264 pages

Jewish in America

Sara B. Blair and Jonathan E. Freedman, Editors

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

"Jewish culture in America is creating a genuinely new archive—a powerful admixture of texts old and new, Jewish and gentile, sacred and secular, on which our writers and critics offer creative commentary and to which they make compelling response. Shaped in the American crucible of race and ethnicity, pushed and pulled by the American traditions of ahistorical and individualist thinking, empowered by a powerful sacramental and hermeneutic tradition yet challenged by that tradition's stunning variety of inflections, impelled to furious response by world crisis, these writers testify not only to the anguishing and joyous complexity of being Jewish in America, but the creative energies such multiplicity generates."
—From the Introduction

This rare and original work of cultural studies offers uncommon and engaging perspectives—as well as provocative and humorous insights—on what it means to be Jewish in America.

Jewish in America features poetry, art, essays, and stories from an impressive and respected list of contributors, including among others Stephen Greenblatt, Richard Kostelanetz, Jacqueline Osherow, Robert Pinsky, Sharon Pomerantz, Nancy Reisman, Grace Schulman, Louis Simpson, Alisa Solomon, and Stephen J. Whitfield.

In addition to pieces by some of the country's leading writers, the book features a stunning gallery of original photographs that transport the viewer from the crowded Coney Island beaches of the 1940s to the landscapes of Oaxaca, Mexico in the 1990s.

Sara Blair is Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan.

Jonathan Freedman is Professor of American Culture and English at the University of Michigan.

September 2004
288 pages

Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting

Ross Chambers

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

Untimely Interventions explores testimonial writing (specifically AIDS writing, Holocaust writing, and writing from the First World War) as it advances a provocative new theory of culture, trauma, genre, and denial. It breaks new ground in its focus on the power of witnessing, in its combination of textual readings, theoretical arguments, and in its ethical underpinnings. It provocatively characterizes testimonial as a genre that feeds off of other genres, and culture as interplay between denial and counter-denial.

Ross Chambers is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Romance Languages & Literature at the University of Michigan. His many books include Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author, Loiterature, The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative, and Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and The Power of Fiction.

Fall 2004
456 pages