Department News, Spring 2019

Welcome to the George Washington University Department of English. We are an engaged and dedicated group of teachers, writers and researchers. Every year our faculty contributes to scholarship in our field with new faculty books, new articles, stories and poems. Some of the more recent books are highlighted in this newsletter. Our publishing develops our teaching, and our English majors grow in their capacity for critical reading, historical analysis and imaginative thought. We continue to offer general survey courses in many fields of literature and creative writing. We also offer specialized courses important for our majors and also courses of broad interest to students across the university. We have been innovative in the introduction of new courses, and we now have a new website. We invite you to explore our web pages, read our blogs and newsletters and let us know what activities you would like us to introduce.

Professor Marshall Alcorn
Chair of the English Department

In researching accounts of diasporic Asian offspring who symbolically “returned” to their ancestral countries, Professor Patricia Chu learned she was not alone in feeling connected to her parents’ culture while growing up in America. The bittersweet emotions experienced and the perspectives gained when she first visited China are reflected in the 100 Asian American return narratives she examined for her book, Where I Have Never Been:  Migration, Melancholia, and Memory in Asian American Narratives of Return. These narratives (including tales of actual return by Asian American immigrants) depict migration-related melancholia, question official histories and portray Asian diasporic families as flexible and transpacific. By considering the theme of return, Chu recasts Asian Americans not only as minorities in America, but also as global subjects in narratives of educational exchange, commerce and global migration.

In the memoir of Yung Wing, a 19^th century Yale graduate who returned to China, Chu argues that Yung engaged with missionary travel narratives and African American slave narratives to contest Western colonialism in China. Considering personal essays collected by historian Josephine Khu, Chu retraces the educational stages and shocks encountered by diasporic Chinese or their offspring in returning to China. In histories where diasporic offspring retrace their ancestors’ lives (written by novelists Lisa See and May-lee Chai, best-selling biographer Denise Chong and scholar Winberg Chai) Chu argues that Asian American narratives of return seek to remedy widely held anxieties about cultural loss and the erasure of personal and family histories from public memory. And in contemporary novels by Lydia Minatoya and Ruth Ozeki, Chu finds the writers deploy a Japanese American feminist literary tradition to engage imaginatively with debates about Japan’s wartime history. In short, narrators of return respond to histories of trauma, loss, and mourning through acts of remembrance and counter memory.

A recent essay by Chu titled "Coming Home" appears on the Temple University Press website.

Professor Alexa Alice Joubin published a new book, Race, in Routledge’s New Critical Idiom series. Co-authored with postcolonial theorist Martin Orkin, this is a major new work in the field, because it draws on culturally and historically diverse materials to examine the intersections of race and gender, whiteness, blackness in a global context and race in South Africa, Israel, India, Europe, the United States, East Asia and Asian America. From Black Lives Matter movements to #MeToo movements, the book close reads a wide array of examples from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance to the 20^th century.

If race is a central part of human identity, can one own or disown one’s race? To which community would a multiracial person, an immigrant or a diasporic subject belong? What future is there for race as a viable analytical concept? The book argues that race is profoundly constituted by language and narratives. Race is a signifier that accumulates meaning by a chain of deferral to other categories of difference such as gender and class.

Co-writing a book involves both singing side by side and ventriloquism. This book started its life in Martin’s notebook. After Martin fell ill, Alexa took over the project but tried to preserve both voices.

In the United States, race often brings to mind people who are not white, while whiteness remains unmarked and serves as a benchmark category—as if white is not a race. The second feature in American racial discourses is the alignment of a race-based social group with innate or inner qualities rather than class. Third, the focus on black and white sometimes obscures other groups within the United States, such that Hispanics, Latinos, Chicanos, Asian Americans and Native Americans often fall under the rubric of ethnicities rather than “race.”