The Asian Family in Literature and Film

This book investigates the ways in which the family unit is now perceived in South and Southeast Asia and the Asian diaspora: its numerous conceptions and the changes it has undergone over the last century and into the new one. The prevailing threads that run through a significant part of the literature and cinema emerging from these societies are the challenges that confront those negotiating changing forms of family, changes which are expressed historically, politically, and socio-culturally, and often in relation to gender, ethnic, or economic imbalances. Though regional and localized in many ways, they are also very much universal in the questions they ask, the lessons they teach, and the connections they make. Theoretically, and in terms of focus, the collection offers a broad range, embracing representation and analysis from scholars across the globe and across disciplines. It assembles written and visual texts from and about India, Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, and the Asian diaspora. How have more fluid concepts of family in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries affected the understanding of family in Asia? How have families in Asia resisted or embraced change? How have they responded to trauma? What do other readingsgendered, feminist, queer, and diasporicbring to modern debates surrounding family? To what extent are notions of family, community, society, and nation represented as interchangeable concepts in Asian societies? This book questions the power dynamics, ethical considerations, and moral imperatives that underpin families and societies within, and beyond, Asian borders.

Assesses local, regional, and global influences on the changing parameters of the Asian family Deconstructs representations of family from Asian and intercultural perspectives Explores the links between text, film and media in depictions of Asian families

Auteur

Bernard Wilson is a Professor (adjunct) at the Department of English Language and Cultures, Faculty of Letters, Gakushuin University, Tokyo.

Sharifah Aishah Osman is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Contenu

1. Introduction.- 2. Reimagining the Asian Family in the New Millennium Part II: Prevailing Practices, Changing Perceptions.- Part I. Trauma, Resistance, Resilience.- 3. We've been there, and we made it through: Representations of Family Resilience in Contemporary Malaysian Youth Literature and Film.- 4. Surrogacy and motherhood in India: Neoliberal Enterprise in a Developing Nation.- 5. Violence and Terror in the Trafficked Narratives of Asian Girls.- 6. Fractured Families and Poetics: Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony.- 7. Haunting Families: Postmemory and Transgenerational Trauma in Min Jin Lee's Pachinko.- 8. The Asian Anglophone Family Novel: Intergenerational Life Writing in Min Jin Lee's Pachinko.- Part II. Power and Obligation.- 9. Unblessed Be Thy Milk: Filial Obedience, Repentance, and Forgiveness in Malay Popular Fiction.- 10. Perfect Parents and Obedient Children in Indonesian Children's Literature.- 11. Power, Discipline and Family: A Study of Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy.- 12. Fatherhood and Precarity: Protective Fathers and Dysfunctional Families in Contemporary Malayalam Cinema.- Part III. The Female in Family.- 13. The Cultural Representation of Single Parenthood in Sinophone (Malaysian) films.- 14. Domesticity and Reproduced Stereotype: The Feminine and Male-absence Family in Chinese/Asian American Film.- 15. Not Just Another Woman in Love: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of the Constructions of Womanhood and Intimacies in Overseas Filipino Worker films.- 16. Haunted Girls: Examining Gothic Hauntings in Contemporary Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction for Young Readers.- Part IV. National Paradigms and Parameters.- 17. Garin Nugroho's A Letter to an Angel: Challenging the New Order's Idealization Concept of Indonesian Families.- 18. When The Parents Play: A Deviant Family against Indonesian State Ibuism.- 19. The Evolution of the Filipino Family: Philippine Children's Stories from 1990 to 2022.- Part V. Diversity and Diaspora.- 20. "A Tricky, Shifting Shoreline": Family and Relation in Jia Qing Wilson-Yang's Small Beauty.- 21. Family as/in Intercultural Performance in Ong Keng Sen's Lear.- 22. Unveiling the Orient: Reimagining the Asian Family through the Eyes of Kamala Khan AKA Ms. Marvel.- 23. A Place to Eat: Reading Food and Space in Asian American Early Readers.- 24. Mixed-teen Candles: Representations of Multiracial Asian American Students and Their Families after Long Duk Dong.- Part VI. Future Families.- 25. When Things Fall Apart, Can the Family Hold? Family versus Individuals in Minari.- 26. The Asian Family in Posthuman Cinema: An exploration of After Yang and Jung_E.- 27. Unheimlich Homes and Defamiliarised Families: Ambivalent Nostalgia in the Short Stories of Ken Liu and Zen Cho.