Comparison Asian American History Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Comparison Asian American Hi explanation - Case Study Example He uses the metaphor of the family picture album, full of old pictures of family members that rear both good and bad memories. He recognizes that this metaphor can only go so far, since sort of of employ visual pictures of his subjects and their families, he uses viva accounts taken from a variety of oral sources. Okihiro recognizes that he has fuse my metaphors (95), as he puts it. Instead of being an inferior way to face hi level as he intimidates, however, it is one of the best way to recount the history of Asian Americans. It is the use of oral history and of autobiography, a common way that the histories of people of color and women see been presented throughout history. Oral history and autobiography have traditionalisticly been used to recount the histories of marginalized and oppressed peoples because they have not been able to access more traditional history. The buckle down narrative, for example, is one of the earliest forms of American autobiography. As African American scholar Joanne M. Braxton (1986) states, the purpose of the slave narrative was not only to present the oral histories of slaves in America, but as a tool around for abolitionists seeking to end slavery. In many cases, the autobiographies of former slaves were accompanied by prefaces written by duster abolitionists to provide them with credibility to white readers. Modern African American writers like Maya Angelou and Richard Wright continued the tradition of using autobiography to present their histories. Other minority groups in America have used autobiography and oral histories for similar purposes. This is certainly true of the presentation of the history of Asian Americans. Another common way to present the history of Asian Americans and other minority groups has been to present them in fictionalized forms. This has been done effectively by Milton Mirayama (1998) in his critically acclaimed, beautifully wri tten, and poignant novel, All I Asking for is My Body. Murayama wrote the first draft of the novel duration a student at Columbia University. It was first published as a short story entitled Ill Crack Your Head Kotsun and published in the Arizona Quarterly in 1959. The story became the first chapter of All I Asking for is My Body and was published in 1968, in a Hawaiian anthology. It was not well received at first, but received critical acclaim and became a passion classic when the University of Hawaii published it in 1988 (Kim, 2005). All I Asking for is My Body reads like a classic autobiography. The novel, including the title, is written in modified pidgin, but is readable by non-pidgin speakers. Murayama seems to understand that he is paper more than just a novel, and that he is presenting Japanese culture and what life was like for Japanese immigrants in Hawaii in the years just prior to and during World War II. Consequently, he spends a extensive deal of time explaining hi s language use.