TY - JOUR
AU - Harrison-Kahan, Lori
AB - The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction. Caroline Rody. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 216 pages. $65.00 cloth. Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. 248 pages. $69.50 cloth; $25.95 paper. Gish Jen’s coming-of-age novel Mona in the Promised Land (1996) offers a hilarious and timely take on conventional immigrant narratives when its Chinese American protagonist, Mona Chang, converts to Judaism in order to assimilate to the upper-middle-class environment of Scarshill, New York. Jen’s comic send-up of multicultural politics, Americanization, and model-minority identity has proven particularly resonant for literary scholars interested in cross-ethnic relations. Jen’s novel figures prominently in two recent studies, Caroline Rody’s The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction (2009) and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials’s Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (2011), which set out to explore new paradigms for the comparative study of ethnic literatures. Working from but extending well beyond the vantage point of Asian American literature, Rody and Schlund-Vials demonstrate that ethnic literary traditions need not be confined to separate spheres. Rody’s and Schlund-Vials’s differing treatments of Mona in the Promised Land indicate the varied 
TI - The Interethnic Imagination: Roots and Passages in Contemporary Asian American Fiction. Caroline Rody.Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials.
JO - Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
DO - 10.1093/melus/mls004
DA - 2013-03-26
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-interethnic-imagination-roots-and-passages-in-contemporary-asian-N7xZPsGZhO
SP - 179
EP - 181
VL - 38
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -