Home and Homeland in Asian Diaspora

“This book addresses a very important question in the Asian diaspora—home and homeland. Bringing together scholars in art, film, literature, art history and gender studies this volume examines Asia diaspora from a multi-disciplined humanities in a way that was never done before. The book adequately engages with recent scholarship by delving into the complex intersections of culture, arts, and identity within the context of Asian diaspora communities.” - Dr Melody Yunzi Li, Assistant Professor of Chinese, University of Houston, USA While many of us may strive to locate a sense of identity and belonging expressed via a home or ancestral homeland; today, however, this connection is no longer, if it ever was, a straightforward identification. This collection aims at mapping narratives or artwork of home/homeland that present shared, private, multifaceted, and often contested experiences of place, especially in the context of today’s migrations and upheavals, along with alarming degrees of increased nativism, racism, and anti-Asian violence. This volume includes papers by artists, filmmakers, and comparative scholars from diverse disciplines of literature, cinema, art history, cultural studies, and gender studies. Our goal is to help literary and art historian scholars in Asian diaspora studies, better decolonize and open up traditional research methodologies, curricula, and pedagogies. Kyunghee Pyun is Associate Professor of History of Art at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on history of collecting, reception of Asian art, diaspora of Asian artists, dress history and material culture, and Asian American visual culture. Jean Amato is Professor in the English and Communication Studies Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her research concentrations are theories of nationalism, diasporic studies, gender and the ancestral home and homeland in twentieth century Chinese and Chinese American literature and film.