Talk: Sanda Mayzaw Lwin

UC Davis Asian American Studies Program, School of Law, and the Department of English invite you to join us for a special talk on

Permanent Guests: Asylum and Loss in Wendy Law-Yone's The Coffin Tree

In her recent book The Constitution of Asian America, Lwin identifies a series of constitutional crises in the last century – Jim Crow segregation, Chinese exclusion, racial prerequisites (and prohibitions) to naturalization, the Japanese American internment, Southeast Asian refugee migration, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and its legacies. The Constitution of Asian America not only supplements literature by and about Asian Americans with legal narratives, but also argues that the very paradigms which have organized Asian American literary studies thus far – immigration, exclusion, assimilation, and exile – are in fact structured by (and help to restructure) American juridical discourse. Her talk stems from this larger work and will examine the figure of the refugee as well as medical and juridical notions of asylum through a reading of Wendy Law-Yone's 1983 novel, The Coffin Tree.

Sanda Mayzaw Lwin
Assistant Professor of American Studies
and English at Yale University

Wednesday, April 18, 2007
4:00-6:00pm
1130 Hart Hall