Narratives of Diaspora (PDF)

Walter S. H. Lim is Associate Professor of English Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (1998) and John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism (2006), as well as co-editor of The English Renaissance, Orientalism, and the Idea of Asia (2011).

"In refreshingly lucid analyses illuminating a broad range of texts that cross genre, gender, and national categories, Narratives of Diaspora is an important contribution to U.S. and ethnic literary studies, drawing on a keenly historicized postcolonial and transnational scholarship to engage seamlessly with the works of diasporic Chinese Americans from geopolitical territories such as Southeast Asia and China that are often viewed as separate." - Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Research Professor, University of California Santa Barbara, USA, and author of Among the White Moon Faces

"Developments in Asian American literature have never been so fascinating - especially when considering, as Walter Lim does in his excellent new book, the geopolitical realities of a transnational Pacific Rim as imagined by an ever-growing body of Chinese American writers. Taking the imagined space of Asia as the object of his critique, Lim shows through thoughtful and provocative readings how recent and canonical writers - from Maxine Hong Kingston to Ha Jin - situate Asia in their works. His conclusion that we are witnessing a shift away from the U.S. as the primary locus of Asian American literature says as much about this literature as it does about our world." - Jeffrey F.L. Partridge, Capital Community College, USA, and author of Beyond Literary Chinatown, an American Book Award Winner from the Before Columbus Foundation, 2007