A Palimpsest of Performance: The Construction of Classicism in the Vallabha Tradition
By Priya Kothari
The western notion of a classical tradition has exclusively centered around ancient Greece and Rome, but this paper suggests a broader construction of the classical. Focusing on the reception of a seminal pre-modern Sanskrit text through the lens of a specific Hindu community–-the Vallabha Sampradaya or Pushtimarga—this paper seeks to broaden our notions of both the classical and Asian America.
Translating the Voices of Tragedy’s “Other” Women: Theresa Has Kyung Cha’s Dictee and Seneca’s Phaedra
By Kristina Chew
Dictee (1982) by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a seminal text in Asian American literary studies and Korean studies, presents a model of how to integrate the study of Asian American literature in Classics. Dictee incorporates elements of classical myth with figures from Korean history, parts of the Catholic liturgy, passages from the autobiography of St. Thérèse de Lisieux, and stills from Carl Theodore Dreiser’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc to present themes of sacrifice, exile, love and redemption (Lewallen 2009, Wolf 1986).
No One Knows His Own Stock: Ocean Vuong’s Reception of Telemachus and Odysseus
By Kelly Nguyen
What do the children of war inherit? In his first full-length collection of poetry, Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong explores this question within the context of the Vietnam War and its intergenerational aftermath. Vuong personalizes the narrative of a war refugee by incorporating elements of his own identity in connection to and in tension with those of his family members. As Vuong succinctly puts it in “Notebook Fragments,” “An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my mother exists./Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me./Yikes.”
Princess Turandot, an Occidental Oriental
By Stephanie Wong
Since its premiere in Milan in 1926, Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot has raised questions about its political, social, and cultural implications for modern production. Current scholarship on Turandot has begun to contextualize the problematic aspects of the opera’s background, such as its setting in “Peking during legendary times,” but scholars have not discussed Turandot’s intercultural connections to western classical antiquity and the cultural impact of the opera’s prolific modern production throughout China.