Assistant Professor Amy Cynthia Tang, of the American Studies and English departments,
Assistant Professor Amy Cynthia Tang, of the American Studies and English departments, specializes in Asian-American and African-American literature—most recently, she has been reading satirical Asian-American plays. Professor Tang sat down with The Argus to discuss her favorite authors, her plans for future classes, and her manuscript.
The Argus: What’s on your bookshelf?
Amy Cynthia Tang: So almost everything on these shelves is either a work of American literature or a critical or theoretical text about American literature, mainly Asian-American and African-American. I have some sections on cultural studies, critical race theory, and narrative theory. I have the books for the courses I’m teaching this term—Trauma in Asian American Literature, and Racial Passing in American Literature. And I have a small section devoted to art history.
A: Do you have anything you’re reading just for fun, not related to classes?
ACT: Right now I’m finishing up this collection of plays by Young Jean Lee called “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven.” It’s a satirical take on what people expect an Asian-American identity play to be about. She’s an experimental playwright, so the characters are non-realist, and she uses stereotypes to engage received ideas of Asian-American identity and push back against them. I was just thinking that it’s sort of related to Theresa Cha’s Dictee—which we’re reading for Trauma—since they’re both by Korean-American women writers, and they’re both very experimental and non-realist. So Lee’s book is both work and pleasure, I guess.
Also I commute from New Haven, so I listen to books on tape—that really is fun. I just finished Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” I got interested in Foer because I have a thesis student who wrote on “Everything is Illuminated.” And now I’m ready to start Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published, unfinished novel, “Juneteenth.” I’ve been meaning to read it for a long time, and finally broke down and said well, there’s the audio book. And bizarrely, I just started looking at it, and it turns out it’s a passing narrative, and I’m teaching a class on racial passing, so there will be some resonances there.
A: Do you have a favorite author or favorite book?
ACT: It’s sort of what I am reading or working on at the moment, so I’m totally enamored by Young Jean Lee right now; I want to find out everything she’s written. There are other authors I return to; there’s Karen Tei Yamashita—she’s an amazing writer with an amazing range. Her book “Through the Arc of The Rain Forest” takes place in an unnamed Latin American country, and it has a sci-fi aspect to it and a magical realism aspect. Susan Choi’s work is really interesting to me. She’s an Asian-American writer who comes at it from an angle—for example, in “The Foreign Student,” writing about the Korean War but setting it in the U.S. South.
A: Were you already interested in Asian-American literature as an undergraduate?
ACT: I first got interested as an undergraduate, but there wasn’t very much published at that time, so I ended up working mainly in African-American literature. I was interested in questions of race, and the most immediate place to go for that was African-American literature. It wasn’t until graduate school that I was able to pursue Asian-American literature in its own right. But I’ve retained that comparative interest in African-American and Asian-American literature, which I think is true of Asian-American academics of my generation—the dominant discourse of writing and thinking about race is often African-American. We get a lot of our theoretical and critical lenses from that literature, so I still keep it in view.
Continue reading:
http://wesleyanargus.com/2012/04/19/professors-bookshelf-amy-cynthia-tang/