The Problematics of Kingston's "Cultural Translation": A Chinese Diasporic View of The Woman Warrior

Year 1996, Issue: 4, 15 - 30, 01.10.1996

Toming Jun Liu

Abstract

By recognizing certain problematics of Maxine Hong Kingston's cultural translation in The Woman Warrior, I question in this article the context in which Asian American ethnicity is delimited within American domestic politics and sustained in narratives of Americanization. Only by calling this context into question can we realize that Kingston's personal ambivalence towards Chinese culture becomes, in the afterlife of her book, collaborative with a Western ambivalence of "desire and derision" Bhabha 67 to an Asian people. I believe that this critique is made necessary and pressing by a Chinese diasporic perspective which I will explain first.

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