Karen Tei Yamashita

Karen Tei Yamashita (born January 8, 1951 in Oakland , California ) is an American writer and lecturer .

Life and work

Yamashita was born in 1951 to Japanese parents in Oakland and grew up in Gardena . From 1969 to 1973 she studied English and Japanese literature at Carleton College and from 1971 to 1972 as an exchange student at Waseda University in Japan . In 1974, Yamashita received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to research Japanese migrants in São Paulo for two years . She stayed in Brazil for nine years . During this time she married the architect Ronaldo Lopes de Oliveira and had two children.

From 1975 she published her first short stories and poems, u. a. in Los Angeles Times Magazine , The Rafu Shimpo and the anthology Calafia: The California Poetry . In 1977 she received a Rockefeller Playwright-in-Residence Fellowship to work at the East West Players Theater in Los Angeles . Her first stage work was premiered there in 1977 with O-Men: An American Kabuki .

In 1984 Yamashita moved with her family from Sao Paulo to Gardena and worked until 1996 as a production assistant for KCET, a local public broadcaster in Los Angeles. In 1990 she published her first novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest , which u. a. was awarded the American Book Award (1991). In it she works (as in other texts) with elements of magical realism and science fiction . Set mainly in Brazil, the novel loosely follows the structure of a telenovela and deals in a satirical way with the effects of globalization, the exploitation of natural resources, migration, socio-economic inequality and technological determinism . The novel also reads as a confrontation with the US imperialism of the 1920s and makes references to Fordlândia , which comes to the surface in “mutated forms”: Yamashita “shows what could happen to the Amazon lowlands if in an age more global Remodeling a valuable, rubbery and possibly extraterrestrial raw material would be mined. "

Yamashita's second novel Brazil-Maru (1992) is about the Japanese who emigrated to Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century. Since 1994 she has been on the editorial board of the Amerasia Journal , an interdisciplinary journal of Asian American Studies. In 1997 her novel Tropic of Orange was published , which takes place in an apocalyptic California and " shifts the dominant Anglo-Euro-American narratives about Los Angeles from the center". In the same year she moved to Santa Cruz to take up a professorship in creative writing and Asian-American literature at the University of California . A Japan Foundation Artist Fellowship (1997) enabled her to do research on Japanese-Brazilian migrant workers ( Dekasegi ) in Japan.

In 2010 her novel I Hotel was published , in which she interweaves stories about the budget hotel that gave it its name. The International Hotel in Little Manila, San Francisco was a core settlement for Asian guest workers from the 1920s. The planned demolition of the hotel in the 1960s led to protests by residents, activists and members of the Peoples Temple sect until the 1970s . For I Hotel Yamashita was u. a. honored with the California Book Award (2010) and an Asian American Literary Award (2011).

Works

Novels

• Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990)
• Brazil-Maru (1992)
• Tropic of Orange (1997)
• I Hotel (2010)

Plays

• O-Men: An American Kabuki (1977).
• Hiroshima Tropical (1984).
• Kusei: An Endangered Species (1986, with Karen Mayeda).
• Hannah Kusoh: An American Butoh (1989).
• Noh Bozos (1993).
• Tokyo Carmen v. LA Carmen (1996).
• Jan Ken Pon (2012).
• Anime Wong: Fictions of Performance (2014, collected pieces).

libretto

• Gozilla Comes to Little Tokyo [aka GiLAwrecks] (1989, music: Vicki Abe).

Intergenre

• Circle K Cycles (2001; short stories, diary, essays).

Awards (selection)

• 1977 Rockefeller Playwright-in-Residence Fellowship
• 1990 Janet Heidinger Kafka Award for Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
• 1991 American Book Award for Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
• 1991 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
• 1997 Japan Foundation Artist Fellowship
• 2009 Chancellor's Achievement Award for Diversity from the University of California, Santa Cruz
• 2010 California Book Award for I Hotel
• 2010 Asian / Pacific American Librarians Association Award in Fiction for I Hotel
• 2011 American Book Award for I Hotel
• 2011 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for I Hotel
• 2011 Asian American Members' Choice Award for I Hotel
• 2011/2012 US Artists Ford Foundation Fellowship

literature

• Jinqi Ling, Across Meridians: History and Figuration in Karen Tei Yamashita's Transnational Novels . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012 ISBN 978-0804778015 .
• Aimee Bahng, "Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest ", in: MELUS 33/4, (2008), pp. 123-144.
• Ruth Y. Hsu, “The Cartography of Justice and Truthful Refractions in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange ”, in: Shirley Lim et al. (Ed.) Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006 ISBN 978-1592134519 pp. 75-99.
• Shu-Ching Chen, "Magic Capitalism and Melodramatic Imagination - Producing Locality and Reconstructing Asian Ethnicity in Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest ", in: Euramerica 34/4 (2004) pp. 587-625.
• Ursula K. Heise, “Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experience of Place”, in: Comparative Literature Studies 41/1 (2004) pp. 126–152.
• J. Edward Mallot, "Signs Taken for Wonders, Wonders Taken for Dollar Signs: Karen Tei Yamashita and the Commodification of Miracle", in: ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 35 / 3-4 (2004) ISSN  1920-1222 pp 115-137 ( online ).
• Dorothy Kim, "Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange: Postcolonial Discourse and (Re) Visions of America at the Century's Edge," in: Lena M. Koski, American Studies at the Millennium: Ethnicity, Culture & Literature . Turku: Turku University Press, 2001 pp. 211-230.
• Michael S. Murashige, “Karen Tei Yamashita,” in: King-Kok Cheung (Ed.), Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers . Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000 ISBN 978-0-8248-2216-3, pp. 320-42.
• Caroline Rody, “Impossible Voices: Ethnic Postmodern Narration in Toni Morrison's Jazz and Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest ”, in: Contemporary Literature 41/4 (2000) pp. 618–641.

Web links

• Karen Tei Yamashita in the Literature Department, University of California, Santa Cruz.
• Karen Tei Yamashita, Circle K (web journals) on cafecreole.net.
• JoAnna Wahlund and Maria Zavialova, Karen Tei Yamashita. Voices from the Gaps (PDF file, 2002).
• Bryan Thao Worra, AAP Interview: Karen Tei Yamashita (PDF file, 2004).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Reiko Tachibana and Kimio Takahashi, "Editors' Introduction East – West: Diasporic Writings of Asia", in: Comparative Literature Studies 45/1 (2008) p. 1.
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Karen Tei Yamashita Papers at: oac.cdlib.org, accessed September 7, 2015 (English).
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Cumulative Bio-Bibliography  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF file) at: humanitiescenter.nsysu.edu.tw, accessed on September 7, 2015 (English).  
4. ↑ Eliko Kosaka, "Yamashita, Karen Tei", in: Seiwoong Oh, Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature . New York: Facts on File, 2013 ISBN 978-1-4381-4058-2 .
5. ^ ^{A b} Douglas Sugano, "Karen Tei Yamashita", in: Emmanuel Sampath Nelson (Ed.), Asian American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook . Westport: Greenwood, 2000 ISBN 978-0313309113 p. 403.
6. ^ Roberta Uno, Unbroken Thread: An Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women . Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993 ISBN 978-0870238567 .
7. ↑ Karen Tei Yamashita, "Author's Note," in: Through the Arc of the Rainforest . New York: Coffee House Press, 1990 ISBN 978-0918273826 .
8. ↑ Ursula K. Heise, “Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experience of Place”, in: Comparative Literature Studies 41/1 (2004) pp. 126–152.
9. ↑ Aimee Bahng, "extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest ", in: Melus 33/4, (2008), p 123rd
10. ↑ Ruth Y. Hsu, “The Cartography of Justice and Truthful Refractions in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange ”, in: Shirley Lim et al. (Ed.) Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006 ISBN 978-1592134519 p. 77.
11. ↑ Karen Tei Yamashita at: faculty.washington.edu, accessed on September 7, 2015 (English).
12. ↑ Estella Habal, San Francisco's International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American community in the anti-eviction movement . Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 2007 ISBN 978-1-59213-445-8 .
13. ↑ Karen Tei Yamashita USA Ford Fellow Literature 2011 ( Memento of the original from September 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from: unitedstatesartists.org, accessed on September 8, 2015.