Stephen Hong Sohn
Biographic Data
| ID | 830742 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Hong Sohn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen Hong |
| FAMILY NAME | Sohn |
| SIGNATURE | SOHN S H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Riverside |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Techno-Orientalism Goes to the Stars
This article explores how Simon Jimenez's The Vanished Birds participates in but also moves beyond the discourse of techno-Orientalism through its depiction of characters, companies, and interstellar travel. Readers encounter a seemingly quintessential techno-Orientalist construct when they meet the book's protagonist, Fumiko. But their attention is soon redirected to a corporate entity whose predatory capitalist practices make it the new, menaci…
When the Minor Becomes Major
This chapter analyzes the storytelling perspective of a Chicano viewpoint in Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex. The narrative models how a Chicano narrator comes to terms with a broadened class consciousness, one that involves a multiracial union of his slaughterhouse-factory workers. Foster also employs a speculative alternate reality that becomes a useful analogy to convey the Chicano subject's fractured self, as a political organizer and social act…
Comparative Colonial Narration
Impossible Narration
This chapter explores the ways two speculative fictions function through racial analogies. Claire Light's “Abducted by Aliens!” and Ted Chiang's The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, though narrated by characters who exist in fantastical landscapes filled with alchemy, time traveling, or alien invaders, can be interpreted through their oblique relationship to external social contexts and historical archives. “Abducted by Aliens!” demonstrates ho…
Model Minority Terrorist
Model Minority Terrorist:Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist Stephen Hong Sohn1 (bio) Over approximately a single decade (1965–1975), the landscape for Asian Americans changed radically: the harshest quotas for Asian immigrants were lifted, ethnic studies programs were created, and academic excellence became associated with Asian Americans. Given all these se…
Like a Miracle”
The war is always with us. As Viet Thanh Nguyen reveals throughout Nothing Ever Dies, a war does not simply vanish when the battles are over and when bodies are buried.1 Nguyen's deep excavation of the personal and political consequences of war inspires this piece and energizes me to consider how such a sweeping event seeps into our memories and transforms when it surfaces in the realm of cultural representations. As a child of survivors of the K…
Racial Asymmetries
Excerpt from Racial Asymmetries
Excerpted from Stephen Hong Sohn, Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds (New York: New York University Press, 2014)
Racial Asymmetries
Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts. Racial Asymmetries specifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the author’s ethnoracial makeup…
Burning Hides What It Burns”
This article explores the growth and maturation of the protoqueer Asian American child as depicted in Alexander Chee’s debut novel Edinburgh (2001). The novel crucially intervenes in and expands existing discourses of childhood, offering up the possibility of alternative inheritances and mythical progenitors. Further still, the process of retrospective storytelling enacts a recovery process that situates the queer Asian American adult alongside a…
Minor Character, Minority Orientalisms, and the Borderlands of Asian America
In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison forcefully reveals how American literature’s representational terrain can be understood through the history of enslavement and oppression. Her paradigm is not only political; she also advances an innovative interpretive approach to American literature, encouraging us to take a closer look at racialized minor characters. An intellectual investment in the minor character …
Theorizing Asian American Fiction
Theorizing Asian American Fiction Stephen Hong Sohn (bio), Paul Lai (bio), and Donald C. Goellnicht (bio) In assessing the state of Asian American literary studies, Susan Koshy claims that, “Although substantial historical scholarship has been produced, the field has been weak in theoretical work, especially when compared to Chicano, Native American and African American Studies. The lack of significant theoretical work has affected its developmen…
Los Indios Bravos
In American Sāmoa, lines are being drawn between immigrants from Western Sāmoa, Tonga and the Philippines, and the indigenous population. A close study of the 2007 Future Political Status report, as well as the responses to the closure of the Chicken of the Sea tuna cannery, demonstrate how anti-immigrant sentiment has grown, along with fears over the stability and survival of the local economy. Such tensions between American Sāmoans and immigran…
These Desert Places
These Desert Places: Tourism, the American West, and the Afterlife of Regionalism in Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine Stephen Hong Sohn (bio) While region, regional writing, and regional modernism have not been immediately associated with Asian American literature, considering these different frames provides a significant intervention into the field. Currently, discourses of transnationalism, diaspora, and globalization have partially o…
Los Indios Bravos
In American Sāmoa, lines are being drawn between immigrants from Western Sāmoa, Tonga and the Philippines, and the indigenous population. A close study of the 2007 Future Political Status report, as well as the responses to the closure of the Chicken of the Sea tuna cannery, demonstrate how anti-immigrant sentiment has grown, along with fears over the stability and survival of the local economy. Such tensions between American Sāmoans and immigran…
Burning Hides What It Burns”
This article explores the growth and maturation of the protoqueer Asian American child as depicted in Alexander Chee’s debut novel Edinburgh (2001). The novel crucially intervenes in and expands existing discourses of childhood, offering up the possibility of alternative inheritances and mythical progenitors. Further still, the process of retrospective storytelling enacts a recovery process that situates the queer Asian American adult alongside a…
Minor Character, Minority Orientalisms, and the Borderlands of Asian America
In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison forcefully reveals how American literature’s representational terrain can be understood through the history of enslavement and oppression. Her paradigm is not only political; she also advances an innovative interpretive approach to American literature, encouraging us to take a closer look at racialized minor characters. An intellectual investment in the minor character …
These Desert Places
These Desert Places: Tourism, the American West, and the Afterlife of Regionalism in Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine Stephen Hong Sohn (bio) While region, regional writing, and regional modernism have not been immediately associated with Asian American literature, considering these different frames provides a significant intervention into the field. Currently, discourses of transnationalism, diaspora, and globalization have partially o…
Theorizing Asian American Fiction
Theorizing Asian American Fiction Stephen Hong Sohn (bio), Paul Lai (bio), and Donald C. Goellnicht (bio) In assessing the state of Asian American literary studies, Susan Koshy claims that, “Although substantial historical scholarship has been produced, the field has been weak in theoretical work, especially when compared to Chicano, Native American and African American Studies. The lack of significant theoretical work has affected its developmen…
Los Indios Bravos
In American Sāmoa, lines are being drawn between immigrants from Western Sāmoa, Tonga and the Philippines, and the indigenous population. A close study of the 2007 Future Political Status report, as well as the responses to the closure of the Chicken of the Sea tuna cannery, demonstrate how anti-immigrant sentiment has grown, along with fears over the stability and survival of the local economy. Such tensions between American Sāmoans and immigran…
Minor Character, Minority Orientalisms, and the Borderlands of Asian America
In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison forcefully reveals how American literature’s representational terrain can be understood through the history of enslavement and oppression. Her paradigm is not only political; she also advances an innovative interpretive approach to American literature, encouraging us to take a closer look at racialized minor characters. An intellectual investment in the minor character …
Racial Asymmetries
Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts. Racial Asymmetries specifically examines the importance of first person narration in Asian American fiction published in the postrace era, focusing on those cultural productions in which the author’s ethnoracial makeup…
Burning Hides What It Burns”
This article explores the growth and maturation of the protoqueer Asian American child as depicted in Alexander Chee’s debut novel Edinburgh (2001). The novel crucially intervenes in and expands existing discourses of childhood, offering up the possibility of alternative inheritances and mythical progenitors. Further still, the process of retrospective storytelling enacts a recovery process that situates the queer Asian American adult alongside a…
Excerpt from Racial Asymmetries
Excerpted from Stephen Hong Sohn, Racial Asymmetries: Asian American Fictional Worlds (New York: New York University Press, 2014)
Racial Asymmetries
Like a Miracle”
The war is always with us. As Viet Thanh Nguyen reveals throughout Nothing Ever Dies, a war does not simply vanish when the battles are over and when bodies are buried.1 Nguyen's deep excavation of the personal and political consequences of war inspires this piece and energizes me to consider how such a sweeping event seeps into our memories and transforms when it surfaces in the realm of cultural representations. As a child of survivors of the K…
When the Minor Becomes Major
This chapter analyzes the storytelling perspective of a Chicano viewpoint in Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex. The narrative models how a Chicano narrator comes to terms with a broadened class consciousness, one that involves a multiracial union of his slaughterhouse-factory workers. Foster also employs a speculative alternate reality that becomes a useful analogy to convey the Chicano subject's fractured self, as a political organizer and social act…
Comparative Colonial Narration
Impossible Narration
This chapter explores the ways two speculative fictions function through racial analogies. Claire Light's “Abducted by Aliens!” and Ted Chiang's The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate, though narrated by characters who exist in fantastical landscapes filled with alchemy, time traveling, or alien invaders, can be interpreted through their oblique relationship to external social contexts and historical archives. “Abducted by Aliens!” demonstrates ho…
Model Minority Terrorist
Model Minority Terrorist:Post-9/11 Asian American Racial Formation and Brown Peril Narrative Discourse in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist Stephen Hong Sohn1 (bio) Over approximately a single decade (1965–1975), the landscape for Asian Americans changed radically: the harshest quotas for Asian immigrants were lifted, ethnic studies programs were created, and academic excellence became associated with Asian Americans. Given all these se…
Techno-Orientalism Goes to the Stars
This article explores how Simon Jimenez's The Vanished Birds participates in but also moves beyond the discourse of techno-Orientalism through its depiction of characters, companies, and interstellar travel. Readers encounter a seemingly quintessential techno-Orientalist construct when they meet the book's protagonist, Fumiko. But their attention is soon redirected to a corporate entity whose predatory capitalist practices make it the new, menaci…
History (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Asian American and Pacific Histories (9 works) · Literature (9 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Narrative (6 works) · Ethnic group (5 works)