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This is the first book-length study in English of the Japanese-language
literary activities of early Japanese migrants to Brazil. It provides a
detailed history of Japanese-language bookstores, serialized newspaper
fiction, original creative works, and critical apparatuses that existed
in Brazil prior to World War II. This case study of the reading and
writing of one diasporic population challenges the dominant mode of
literary study, in which texts are often explicitly or implicitly
understood through a framework of ethno-nationalism.
Self-representations by writers in the diaspora reveal flaws in this
prevailing framework through what Edward Mack calls "acquired alterity,"
in which expectations about the stability of ethnic identity are
subverted in surprising ways. Acquired Alterity encourages a
reconsideration of the ramifications (and motivations) of cultural
analyses of texts and the constructions of peoplehood that are often the
true objects of literary knowledge production.