{"id":22692,"date":"2012-04-26T02:57:41","date_gmt":"2012-04-26T02:57:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=22692"},"modified":"2012-04-26T03:06:54","modified_gmt":"2012-04-26T03:06:54","slug":"professor%e2%80%99s-bookshelf-amy-cynthia-tang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=22692","title":{"rendered":"Professor\u2019s Bookshelf: Amy Cynthia Tang"},"content":{"rendered":"

Professor\u2019s Bookshelf: Amy Cynthia Tang<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Wesleyan Argus<\/a>
\nMiddletown, Connecticut
\n2012-04-19<\/p>\n

Miriam Olenick<\/strong>, Staff Writer<\/p>\n

Assistant Professor Amy Cynthia Tang<\/a>, 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Argus:<\/strong> What\u2019s on your bookshelf?<\/p>\n

Amy Cynthia Tang:<\/strong> 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\u2019m 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:<\/strong> Do you have anything you\u2019re reading just for fun, not related to classes?<\/p>\n

ACT:<\/strong> Right now I\u2019m finishing up this collection of plays by Young Jean Lee<\/a> called \u201cSongs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s a satirical take on what people expect an Asian-American identity play to be about. She\u2019s 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\u2019s sort of related to Theresa Cha\u2019s<\/a> Dictee<\/em><\/a>\u2014which we\u2019re reading for Trauma\u2014since they\u2019re both by Korean-American women writers, and they\u2019re both very experimental and non-realist. So Lee\u2019s book is both work and pleasure, I guess.<\/p>\n

Also I commute from New Haven<\/a>, so I listen to books on tape\u2014that really is fun. I just finished Jonathan Safran Foer\u2019s<\/a> \u201cExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close<\/a>.\u201d I got interested in Foer because I have a thesis student who wrote on “Everything is Illuminated<\/a>.” And now I\u2019m ready to start Ralph Ellison\u2019s<\/a> posthumously published, unfinished novel, \u201cJuneteenth.\u201d I\u2019ve been meaning to read it for a long time, and finally broke down and said well, there\u2019s the audio book. And bizarrely, I just started looking at it, and it turns out it\u2019s a passing<\/a> narrative, and I\u2019m teaching a class on racial passing<\/a>, so there will be some resonances there…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor\u2019s Bookshelf: Amy Cynthia Tang The Wesleyan Argus Middletown, Connecticut 2012-04-19 Miriam Olenick, Staff Writer 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,2895,8,6462,20,25],"tags":[9040,9038,9039,10532,10530,10531,4573],"class_list":["post-22692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-campus-life","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","category-women","tag-amy-c-tang","tag-amy-cynthia-tang","tag-amy-tang","tag-miriam-olenick","tag-the-wesleyan-argus","tag-wesleyan-argus","tag-wesleyan-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22692\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}