Asian American Experience

Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority

Eleanor Ty

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780252099380
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Eleanor Ty's bold exploration of literature, plays, and film reveals how young Asian Americans and Asian Canadians have struggled with the ethos of self-sacrifice preached by their parents. This new generation's narratives focus on protagonists disenchanted with their daily lives. Many are depressed. Some are haunted by childhood memories of war, trauma, and refugee camps. Rejecting an obsession with professional status and money, they seek fulfillment by prioritizing relationships, personal growth, and cultural success. As Ty shows, these storytellers have done more than reject a narrowly defined road to happiness. They have rejected neoliberal capitalism itself. In so doing, they demand that the rest of us reconsider our outmoded ideas about the so-called model minority.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Precarity and the Pursuit of Unhappiness
• 2 Que(e)rying the American Dream in Films of the Early Twenty-First Century
• 3 Haunted Memories, Spaces, and Trauma: The Unsuccessful Immigrant
• 4 Representations of Aging in Asian Canadian Performance
• 5 Work, Depression, Failure
• 6 Gender, Post-9/11, and Ugly Feelings
• Coda
• Works Cited
• Index