Transcreator´s Preface, by Yunte Huang.Think Haiku, Act Locu-An Experiment in Back-Translation

Think Haiku, Act Locu-An Experiment in Back-Translatio

An Excerpt from Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History

In the following excerpt from Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History (New York: Liveright, 2018), Yunte Huang investigates the history, implications, and contradictions of Chang and Eng Bunker's ownership of African American slaves. Excerpted from Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang. Copyright © 2018 by Yunte Huang. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved

Booktalk at Library : Inseparable : the original Siamese twins and their rendezvous with American history

This book has been named one of the Best Books of the Year in 2018 by Newsweek, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and National Public Radio. Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography, Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaited portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874), twins conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, who were “discovered” in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almost implausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroads of rural America to bring “entertainment” to the Jacksonian mobs. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavation of America’s historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the “other”─a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself. Photo Album: https://gallery.ln.edu.hk/lib/Booktalk-at-library_Inseparable

Yunte Huang, 35th Annual ODU Literary Festival

Yunte Huang is the author of Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (2010), which won the Edgar Award and California Book Award and was also the finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A poet and translator, he has published Transpacific Displacement (2003), Cribs (2005), Transpacific Imaginations (2007), and other books. He is currently a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Transpacific displacement: ethnography, translation, and intertextual travel in twentieth-century American literature

Yunte Huang takes a most original "ethnographic" approach to more and less well-known American texts as he traces what he calls the transpacific displacement of cultural meanings through twentieth-century America's imaging of Asia. Informed by the politics of linguistic appropriation and disappropriation, Transpacific Displacement opens with a radically new reading of Imagism through the work of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. Huang relates Imagism to earlier linguistic ethnographies of Asia and to racist representations of Asians in American pop culture, such as the book and movie character Charlie Chan, then shows that Asian American writers subject both literary Orientalism and racial stereotyping to double ventriloquism and countermockery. Going on to offer a provocative critique of some textually and culturally homogenizing tendencies exemplified in Maxine Hong Kingston's work and its reception, Huang ends with a study of American translations of contemporary Chinese poetry, which he views as new ethnographies that maintain linguistic and cultural boundaries

Transcreator´s Preface, by Yunte Huang.Think Haiku, Act Locu-An Experiment in Back-Translation

Think Haiku, Act Locu-An Experiment in Back-Translatio