Cynthia Sau-ling Wong, professor of Asian-American Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a lecture at Hamilton on April 1 titled "Textualizing Global Feminisms: Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior. The lecture discussed one of the best-known works of Asian-American literature, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of A Girlhood Among Ghosts, as a work of feminist and multi-cultural "world literature."
Professor Sau-ling Wong began by speaking about how The Woman Warrior grew from a small, autobiographical novel into a work which has been translated into more than 20 languages and is taught in many college curricula, earning it the status of "world literature." It is not only aesthetic merit or thematic significance which allows a novel to become so popular, Sau-ling Wong said. A book's popularity and academic prominence can also be explained by institutional factors.
At the time of the book's publication in 1976, The Woman Warrior fit particularly well into the changing academic environment. It worked in a post-modernist and post-structural context, as well as having significant feminist and Asian-American meaning. The book was widely placed on college curricula as a multi-cultural and feminist work. The Woman Warrior, Sau-ling Wong said, has been canonized as a work of "world literature" at the same time it is used in academia as a "non-canonical" work.
But what is "world literature"? Professor Sau-ling Wong discussed different perspectives on the term, beginning with literary scholar Wai Chee Dimock's definition of world literature as an anarchic, extraterrestrial entity which influences people through circuitous routes. Sau-ling Wong disagrees with this definition, she said, because it implies that literature works only on an idealistic level and is not influenced by national political and institutional structures. A better definition according to Sau-ling Wong is that of scholar David Damrosch, who describes world literature as works which circulate beyond their culture of origin and become present within a literary system other than their own. When the piece of literature travels to other literary systems, the meanings attributed to the work may change according to cultural and political structures.
For example, Sau-ling Wong recalled a story in which ethnically Chinese students in Indonesia said that reading The Woman Warrior, a book by a Chinese-American woman, helped them to contextualize their own Chinese heritage and status as a minority group. She also discussed the differing meanings attributed to the novel by American and Chinese literary critics. The Woman Warrior is currently the only book by a Chinese-American author on the college-level reading list in the People's Republic of China, and is studied by many graduate students in literature. However, Chinese academics see the book in a much different light than that in which it is seen by American or even Taiwanese critics, Sau-ling Wong said. US critics tend to see the book as deconstructing differences between Chinese and Americans, while Chinese critics tend to see the book as acknowledging Chinese/American cultural differences as truths. Chinese academics also tend to see the book as thematically significant to their own anxieties about globalization, hybridity and cultural survival.
Professor Sau-ling Wong concluded her lecture by defining The Woman Warrior as what she calls a "proxy-text" in world literature. This means, she said, that the work has surpassed its original context to serve new discursive purposes in different cultures.
Sau-ling Wong's lecture was part of the series "Tracing Feminisms in Global Flows of Art & Culture," presented by the Jane Watson Irwin Endowment, which supports the needs and interests of women at Hamilton. This lecture was also been supported by the Women's Studies department, the East Asian Languages and Literature department, the Edwin Lee Fund of the Asian Studies Program, the Kirkland Endowment, Faculty for Women's Concerns, the Asian Cultural Society, the Brothers, the Womyn's Center, and the West Indian and African Association.
-- by Caroline R. O'Shea '07
