But it is love that ultimately shines through. Seminar paper from the year in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Vienna, language: English, abstract: The following seminar paper is concerned with the presentation of a hybrid identity in Fred Wahs Diamond Grill and the cultural significance of food.
In the beginning, the most important stages of the authors life shall help to embed the story in its historical and socio-cultural context. After a detailed discussion on the symbolic meaning of food, with various examples providing insight into the many functions that food takes in daily life and human existence, as well as its crucial role in the context of communities, the paper will shift its focus to the text itself.
The term biotext" and its emergence will be discussed and information on identity, ethnicity, other important themes and issues in the text and the language employed by Wah will be given.
The last part of this paper constitutes its centrepiece, in which food as a metaphor and its cultural significance as a multilayered strategy and trope in postcolonial life writing will be discussed. The culinary language employed in Wahs innovative discourse of Diamond Grill makes the concept of food a metonymy of the elaboration of identity and culture. The use of food as a metaphor in the authors culinary memoirs will be discussed, and the way in which the metaphor of food provides an axis for the understanding of Wahs explorations of his socio-cultural background will be explained in more detail.
Writing the Roaming Subject explores issues of identity formation, representation, and resistance in Canada and suggests that these are particularly crucial questions during a period of Canadian literary history. From David Henry Hwang's M.
The interdisciplinary essays in Culture, Identity, Commodity provide close textual readings and general theoretical frameworks from American, Australian, and Canadian perspectives for a range of textual productions - novels, autobiographies, plays, and Chinese cooking shows - that address this dynamic field. Established and emerging scholars offer timely discussions of "diasporic Chinese studies," drawing on transnational, postcolonial, globalisation, and racialisation theories.
The collection examines what is at stake in the consideration of diasporic literatures and the connections and fissures emerging in these new critical terrains.
Book jacket. Davis and Peter H. Process poetics is about radical poetry — poetry that challenges dominant world views, values, and aesthetic practices with its use of unconventional punctuation, interrupted syntax, variable subject positions, repetition, fragmentation, and disjunction. A historiography of the radical poets, and a roster of the little magazines, small press publishers, literary festivals, and other such sites that have sustained poetic experimentation, provide context.
Lean back into Louisiana lore with an earful of New Orleans jazz and a bellyful of Cajun cuisine. But when the music dies down and the lights flicker out, hushed conversations bleed into the darker mysteries of the Pelican State. Folklorist Alan Brown educates and entertains with tales of the unseemly, bizarre and otherworldly, like the legends of the Rougarou, the Lutin and the Honey Island Swamp Monster. Author : Maria N.
Reading Chinese Transnationalisms responds to the growing interest in transnational cultural studies by examining Chinese transnationalism from a variety of perspectives.
It's my third time returning to this work, and I cannot recommend it enough. Wah's father ran the Diamond Grill, and it provides the setting for most of the vignettes in the book. Fred Wah is a poet, and often incorporates prose poetry into his vignettes - sometimes the device works, and sometimes it ends up detracting from the story. Either way, this is a quick and enjoyable read that deals with questions of Fred Wah's stories of his childhood growing up as the son of a "Canadian-born Chinese-Scots-Irishman raised in China" and a Swedish-born Canadian from Swift Current.
Either way, this is a quick and enjoyable read that deals with questions of race and identity, as well as the simple things that make life worthwhile - like good food. Oct 20, Kate rated it it was amazing Shelves: school , thesis-reads. I have to say this book was really interesting. I like the way the book was written and how it was very fragmented. I found that Wah kept your interest and really made an interesting story for the reader.
Sometimes it was annoying that he kept telling you the same story but it all played into the idea that he was telling people memories from his childhood. I found that this novel was quite interesting and kept you reading. Jun 24, Val rated it it was amazing. This is a powerful biotext about the historical effects of racism on ChineseHYPHENCanadians in Canada read: Chinese Immigration Law and how the author, who can visibly "pass" as white, is affected by it in trying to define himself in his mixed heritage.
Set in a diner, it ties in recipes which I need to try! Mar 20, Andrea rated it it was amazing. Funny and insightful. An excellent book if you want to learn about multiculturalism, hybridity, or just laugh your ass off. May 17, Alanna McFall rated it really liked it Shelves: reading-resolution. A slow, meditative journey of combined poetry But it can also be overlong, and I ended up feeling like I knew more details about the eponymous Diamond Grill than I knew real statements from Wah.
His mother was the daughter of two Swedish immigrants to Canada, and his father was half-white, half-Chinese, but raised in China from age four into his early twenties. So Fred Wah grew up in small town Canada, three-quarters white and reading as white to strangers, but bearing a Chinese last name and growing up in the cultural microcosm of a Chinese diner.
I think that these poems could pack a lot of punch individually or in a smaller collection. However, Diamond Grill as a whole feels too dense and like it covers similar or the same ground too many times.
I am sure this would feel very different to me if I was seeing my own experience and my biracial Canadian and Japanese roommate is eager to borrow this book after me.
But I walked away from the collection with too much surface detail, feeling somewhat stuck in a glut of anecdotes and memories. Individual pieces still stood out, but most got lost in the whole.
I am glad I read Diamond Grill, but also wish I had spread it out a bit more, reading a poem or two at a time rather than trying to mainline it. I might just need to change my approach to poetry collections, and return to this one at another time. Would I Recommend It: Yes, but not all at once. Mar 23, Chuk rated it it was amazing.
Very short chapters, some of them are almost like stream of consciousness poetry. Jan 01, Mridula rated it really liked it Shelves: I read this book to study form and structure when crafting memoir. Fred Wah chose such a powerful way to tell his family history--through poetry and prose.
I loved how he told family stories in fragments as few of us remember things in clear, precise detail. Wah's Afterword on hyphenating identities and bio-fiction was a great summary on his writing choices overall and for this book. Feb 02, Micaela added it Shelves: memoirs. The writing style made this very difficult to get through -- many disjunctive blocks of memory, lots of telling rather than showing, and quite a bit of repetition from one "chapter" to the next, as well.
The bits of personal and family history were interesting all the same. Nov 15, Alexander Weber rated it liked it. Could have been better. I honestly don't know what to say. Most of the 'chapters' left me feeling nothing. Some were interesting. Food, identity, Canada, China, race, mixed-race Great stuff Oct 10, Dessa rated it really liked it Shelves: canadiana , grad-school. Back at the novels for comps, and this one was a good way to get back into it.
Dec 09, Brenda Gunn added it. My tenth anniversary edition of Diamond Grill, the captivating, stunning hybrid mash-up prose-poetry-'bio-fiction' of the amazing Fred Wah Waiting for Saskatchewan is one I have dog-eared, re-read, thumbed and earmarked with post-it flags, and I never do that.
Feb 21, Mary rated it did not like it Shelves: school. This book was just not for me. Combined too many things that I'm not a fan of: short story, modern ish? Nice book, peculiar way of writing, structurally poetic. Not for everyone, every mood, every time.
Culture culture culture. Oct 05, Garrett Johnson rated it it was amazing. Read it twice, or maybe three times at that. New connections are able to be pulled out of it upon each revision of this collection.
Mar 17, Julianna Wagar rated it liked it. I loved the discussion of immigration and identity but I was a little bored in certain areas. Oct 12, Shannon rated it it was amazing. The format took some getting used to for me , but the stories are really a love letter to his dad and childhood. Feb 23, Derek Newman-Stille rated it liked it Shelves: can-lit. Wah creates a recipe for himself in this text, intertwining ideas of ethnicity with imagery of food.
But, like any good recipe, it is a subjective piece, forming a rough guideline by the chef, and therefore constantly subject to revision, change, and the mix of the experience in the kitchen. Despite the use of recipe imagery and the interplay with identity, Wah complicates the idea of an easy ascription to identity. It is not a simple mixing of elements of experience, but rather something that is Wah creates a recipe for himself in this text, intertwining ideas of ethnicity with imagery of food.
It is not a simple mixing of elements of experience, but rather something that is always open to revision, inherently speculative, and passionately defiant. The novel explores such themes as family, culture, race, and belonging, as well as how these factors affect his sense of identity.
It is the structure of the book that exemplifies his personal struggle and his families collective struggle with identity. For family. The characters receive little introduction, if any because Wah is writing the book not with the audience in mind but rather for himself and his family.
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