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Since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular—and controversial—writers in the Asian American literary tradition. This book traces her development as a writer and cultural activist through both ethnic and feminist discourses, investigating her novels, occasional writings, and her two-book ‘life-writing project’. The publication of The Woman Warrior not only propelled Kingston into the mainstream literary limelight, but also precipitated a vicious and ongoing controversy in Asian American letters over the authenticity—or fakery—of her cultural references. This book traces the debates through the appearance of China Men (1981), as well as the novel Tripmaster Monkey (1989) and her most recent work The Fifth Book of Peace.
; the latter refers to the processes by which citizens organise and participate in actions designed to achieve political change. Artists can work across both categories; as cultural activists they use their creative skills and vision in an effort to achieve political change and social justice by mobilising people through emotional engagement; those who engage more directly in politics also make use of political means, such as mounting political demonstrations, circulating petitions, campaigning, working for a political party, or actively organising community events to
seen from the debates generated within the Caribbean Artists Movement in the later 1960s, where the question of creating appropriate popular forms was incessantly addressed, and where it became the cause, it seems, of incessant disputation. The issue of the popular brought the cultural activists of CAM hard up against the question of British civilisation: how, in politics, in the aesthetic imagination, in the
resources at the disposal of activists in the early twenty-first century are radically different from those avail- c07.indd 158 6/5/2009 10:59:51 AM Conclusions 159 able over 30 years ago. Among the most vital of RAR’s human resources, it must be noted, was the generation of cultural activists, such as Red Saunders, Roger Huddle and David Widgery, that helped to give the movement its unique identity and political character. It is at least arguable that the racially and ethnically diverse character of so much modern pop music owes something to the pioneering work
Kingston has gained a reputation as one of the most popular – and controversial – writers in the Asian American literary tradition, who has been by turn celebrated and excoriated. Kingston’s development as a writer and cultural activist in relation to both ethnic and feminist traditions, occurs across the range of her expanding oeuvre: her two novels, her occasional writings and her two-book life-writing project. How do we account for the phenomenal success of The Woman Warrior – the most widely read title in American universities today – a success that not only
John Pepper Clark, Chinua Achebe, Duro Ladipo, Tunji Oyelana, Jimi Solanke, the German scholar and cultural activist Ulli Beier, Austrian artist Susanne Wenger, and many other formidable individuals working in drama, poetry and visual culture who clustered around the famous Mbari artistic collective. Ibadan is often touted as the birthplace of modern Nigerian letters owing to the sheer number of major African writers who sought refuge in the city at this time. Even before independence, Ibadan had gained prominence as a veritable hub of
cultural activists, rather than launching writing onto an unsuspecting market. In bringing new readers into existence, the Fed would adapt the idea of ‘a reading public’. In the 1930s, Q. D. Leavis had outlined the emergence and disintegration of ‘the’ reading public, but her concerns had been with a cultural elite.3 Workshops aimed to make the process and products of publishing accessible to new readers. For example, QueenSpark in Brighton successfully linked the Alternative publishing and audience participation 129 rarefied world of publishing to a working
cultural communities to thrive when they organized themselves around ecological communities that shared physical and ecological associations. Bioregions were mapped by overlaying descriptions of watersheds, land forms, traditional territorial boundaries, patterns of flora and fauna, climate, and economic linkages. In 1971, Van Newkirk collaborated with the cultural activist Peter Berg, from San Francisco, to expand the concept of the ‘bioregion’ to a political organizing unit. ‘A bioregion refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness – to a place
and activist Harry Belafonte, who facilitated her travel to America. In November 1959 Miriam arrived in New York in the full glare of the media. Her debut television appearance on The Steve Allen Show , with its viewership of 60 million people, was followed by a series of sold-out performances at upmarket venues. 23 She would meet and befriend artistic and cultural activists as diverse as Sidney Poitier, Duke Ellington, Diahann Carroll, Nina Simone, Marlon Brando, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, as well as radical African-American writers Maya Angelou (see Brown in
facing beur cultural activists in 1994 was arguably even more problematic. The return of the Right to power in 1993, with its policy of curbing immigrant rights to French nationality and citizenship, its introduction of racist identity controls as a measure against fundamentalist terrorism and its provocative directive allowing head teachers to ban the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in French state schools, meant that Arabs, immigrants and Muslims – and