Description
By exploring various representations of illness and disability in Chinese American literature, Sarah Tang argues that narratives of ailments transcend the boundaries of medical therapy to become essential metaphors that help reconstruct identity formations for Chinese Americans.
Moving beyond medical interpretations, Tang demonstrates how conditions such as madness, infertility, amnesia, anorexia, insomnia, leprosy, and epidemic disease serve as symbolic expressions of displacement, marginalization, and resilience in the Chinese North American experience. With a focus on key works published between 1970 and 2020 by writers including Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Yan Geling, Ma Ling, Zhang Ling, and others, this book uncovers how illness metaphors illuminate the intersections of race, gender, and culture in diasporic life. By weaving literary analysis with insights from cultural studies, trauma theory, and postcolonial thought, Metaphors of Illness and Disability in Chinese American Literature argues that illness metaphors provide unique access to the struggles and strategies of Chinese North American communities.
Table of Contents
Part One - Speaking Bodies: Madness, Reproduction, and Gendered Pathology
1. Beyond Oppression and Resistance: Madness as Intercultural Epistemology
2. Fantasizing Maternal Infanticide: Negotiating Hybridity and Motherhood
3. Reproductive Failure: Infertility, Impotence, and Diasporic Masculinity
Part Two - Disciplined Bodies: Appetite, Memory, and Trauma
4. Disorderly Appetites: Anorexia and the Politics of Refusal
5. Enduring Aftershocks: Insomnia, Trauma, and the Journey of Recover
6. Forgetting to Remember: Amnesia, Memory, and Diasporic Survival
Part Three - Contagious Bodies: Stigma, History, and Apocalypse
7. Leprosy as Metaphor and the Reconstruction of Historical Memory in Geling Yan's The Epidemic of Pear Blossoms
8. Capitalist Chrononormativity and Temporal Refusal in the Chinese American Dystopian Novel Severance
Conclusion
Bibliography
Product details
| Published | 06 Aug 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (PDF) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 256 |
| ISBN | 9798216258292 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 10 tables |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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