Chinese and Native American Connections

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Dr. Wen Jin will provide an analysis of Chinese/American poet-scholars Alex Kuo and Aku Wuwu, with a focus on their poetry, fiction, and critical writings that bring together Native American culture and the cultures of ethnic minorities in contemporary China. Dr. Jin shows the broader implications of the two authors by discussing the ways in which ideas of “ethnicity” and “indigineity” function in Chinese and American contexts and sketching a short history of Chinese-Native American contact in recent decades.

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Author Bio

Presented By:

Wen Jin is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Dr. Jin received her BA from Fudan University, Shanghai, and PhD from Northwestern. She specializes in twentieth-century American literature; Asian American literature; narratology; theories of race, ethnicity, and (trans)nationalism; Sinophone literature; and twentieth-century Chinese literature.

Dr Jin recently completed a book, Pluralist Universalism: An Asian Americanist Critique of U.S. and Chinese Multiculturalisms, which compares fictions of multiculturalism from the U.S. and China in the post-Cold War era. She has also been published in Contemporary Literature, American Quarterly, Critique (forthcoming), and the edited collection, Minority Serial Fictions. She has written articles in Chinese as well, and is a Chinese co-translator of Hemingway’s True at First Light (Yiwen, 2000). Her new project investigates the intersections of secular magic and cognitive theories of narrative impact.