Author of six novels and two collections of short stories, and the only two‐time winner of Canada's prestigious Giller Prize for fiction, M. G. Vassanji engages themes that include multiple diasporas, interracial tension and religious intolerance, immigrant communities, history and memory, the relationship between the personal and the political, and the use of stories to link people to their past. His only non‐fiction work so far,
A Place Within: Rediscovering India
(2008), is both travelogue and history as Vassanji returns to the country of his ancestors and reflects on his family's story.
Focusing on Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being , this essay engages the transits between the fictional and the autobiographical by deploying notions from narratology, including a proposal regarding the difference between “fiction” and “the fictive,” reflections on metatextual performance, and the idea of the implied author.
This essay explores exercises in life writing for children by reading several Asian American autobiographies, to analyze their authors' purposes and factor them as part of a dynamic network of creative writing. Reading these autobiographies critically unveils the writers' strategies of meaning and their significance in the intersecting contexts of Asian American children's literature and genre studies. The texts offer diverse examples of the lives of young Asian or Asian American subjects whose experiences attest to the diversity of the classification "Asian American." The analysis covers a range of texts: some center on pre-immigration life, others on growing up as a minority person in America, others on war and internment, and some on urban life in the United States. This diversity proposes a range of experiences that allow the child reader, particularly the Asian American child, to learn about the possibilities of ethnic experience.
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