Assistant Professor Amy Cynthia Tang, of the American Studies and English departments, specializes in Asian-American and African-American literature\u2014most 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.<\/p>\n
The Argus: What’s on your bookshelf?
\nAmy 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\u2014Trauma in Asian American Literature, and Racial Passing in American Literature. And I have a small section devoted to art history.<\/p>\n
A: Do you have anything you’re reading just for fun, not related to classes?
\nACT: Right now I’m finishing up this collection of plays by Young Jean Lee called \u201cSongs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven.\u201d 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\u2014which we’re reading for Trauma\u2014since 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.<\/p>\n
Also I commute from New Haven, so I listen to books on tape\u2014that really is fun. I just finished Jonathan Safran Foer’s \u201cExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close.\u201d 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, \u201cJuneteenth.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
A: Do you have a favorite author or favorite book?
\nACT: 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\u2014she’s an amazing writer with an amazing range. Her book \u201cThrough the Arc of The Rain Forest\u201d 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\u2014for example, in \u201cThe Foreign Student,\u201d writing about the Korean War but setting it in the U.S. South.<\/p>\n
A: Were you already interested in Asian-American literature as an undergraduate?
\nACT: 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\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n
Continue reading: Assistant Professor Amy Cynthia Tang, of the American Studies and English departments, specializes in Asian-American and African-American literature\u2014most recently, she<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":72448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19418","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"magazineBlocksPostFeaturedMedia":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg","medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","medium_large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","1536x1536":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","2048x2048":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-highlighted-post":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-featured-post-medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-featured-post-small":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x90.jpg","colormag-featured-image":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-default-news":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg","colormag-featured-image-large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-block-extra-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-small-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-medium-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg"},"magazineBlocksPostAuthor":{"name":"Admin","avatar":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/53e6cdc30765aade0129f85e5aeb50124b1d3f5bb9a70373be31e4eb328371e0?s=96&d=mm&r=g"},"magazineBlocksPostCommentsNumber":"0","magazineBlocksPostExcerpt":"Assistant Professor Amy Cynthia Tang, of the American Studies and English departments, specializes in Asian-American and African-American literature\u2014most recently, she","magazineBlocksPostCategories":["News"],"magazineBlocksPostViewCount":147,"magazineBlocksPostReadTime":4,"magazine_blocks_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg",113,170,false],"medium":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg",113,170,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg",113,150,true]},"magazine_blocks_author":{"display_name":"Admin","author_link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?author=1"},"magazine_blocks_comment":0,"magazine_blocks_author_image":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/53e6cdc30765aade0129f85e5aeb50124b1d3f5bb9a70373be31e4eb328371e0?s=96&d=mm&r=g","magazine_blocks_category":"News<\/a>","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19418","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19418"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19418\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/72448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19418"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19418"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19418"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nhttp:\/\/wesleyanargus.com\/2012\/04\/19\/professors-bookshelf-amy-cynthia-tang\/<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"