List of Literary Works: 

(The following stories are all available alphabetically under the Canvas Course Reader heading in Modules. No more than two different project-groups may select the same story)

• Leila Aboulela’s “The Museum” (takes place in Aberdeen, Scotland)

This story addresses the power relations of foreign students and their Scottish counterparts, pointing to the marginalization experienced by the foreigners in the Western metropolis. The museum is used to demonstrate the East-West heterotopia and a site of cultural critique.

• Deepak Unnikrishnan’s “Birds” (takes place in Dubai)

Focuses on a woman who nurses injured workers who fall from the skyscrapers quickly being built throughout Dubai. The story discusses issues of class imbalance in an Eastern city that is becoming Westernized.

• Deepak Unnikrishnan’s “Taxi Man” (takes place in Dubai)

From the perspective of a Dubai taxi driver who speaks to his American born with Indian heritage passenger about the life and dynamics of the city. The story criss-crosses the East and West in the way the characters are presented.

• Toshiyuki Horie’s “The Owl’s Estate” (takes place in Tokyo)

This narrative follows a Japanese collector of Western books who encounters a group of Western women in Tokyo. The story illustrates subtle cross-overs of East-West connections through domestic spaces and behavior from the characters.

• Nury Vittachi’s “The Queen of Statue Square” (takes place in Hong Kong)

Focuses on a group of Filipina domestic workers who struggle to obtain permanent residency in the city. The story showcases the role of civil liberties in East-West urban spaces.

• Jenn Chan Lyman’s “The Seventh Year” (takes place in Hong Kong)

This story examines funerary practices in Hong Kong and clashes between characters not completely accepted in the family. The narrative presents the complexity of East-West identities and ideologies that collide.

• Ploy Pirapokin’s “Saving Grace” (takes place in Hong Kong)

This follows the exploits of a group of affluent high school students from Eastern and Western families who trek through the nocturnal city streets in search of adventure. The story showcases the cross-section of East-West identities and growing up with privilege in Hong Kong.

• Ysabelle Cheung’s “Field, Burning” (takes place in Hong Kong)

Focuses on the history of a grave-sweeper originally from China and recounts the strange and horrifying tale of how she came to be a cemetery caretaker in Hong Kong more than a century after her birth. This narrative examines the blurring of the past and present, the traditional and ultra-modern as ways to disrupt East-West constructions of time and space.

• Sema Kaygusuz’s “A Couple of People” (takes place in Istanbul, Turkey)

The author contemplates the idea that people in Istanbul don’t live in the ‘real’ city, but rather, its inhabitants play out old memories of distant homelands, thus showing how the city is just an illusion of somewhere else. Memory disrupts how spaces are conceived and generated in this quintessential East-West city.

• Türker Armaner’s “The Well” (takes place in Istanbul, Turkey)

A Turkish writer grows paranoid as he perceives is being hunted through the city for his Western writing and ideologies. We receive snapshots of thoughts and memory of the protagonist as his lifetime of Eastern and Western worlds blends and overlaps.

• Gӧnül Kıvılcım’s “Out of Reach” (takes place in Istanbul, Turkey)

A young housekeeper is drawn to the family’s son, who has been studying in the West and who teaches her ideas he has learned from Western culture. The narrative highlights the coalescence Istanbul has always had with Eastern and Western culture and the lure to and illicitness of the West.

• Karin Karakaşlı’s “Istanbul, Your Eyes are Black” (takes place in Istanbul, Turkey)

The story focuses on a young woman who rents the room of her elderly landlady’s now deceased sister. The protagonist is intrigued by a photograph of the young sister and begins to see herself in this person. This story encapsulates a love story of strength and endurance, and the East-West city as a character in the narrative.

• Elias Farkouh’s “Amman’s Birds Sweep Low” (takes place in Amman, Jordan)

The narrative comprises five Jordanian characters with a variety of personalities, each of whom conveys the atmosphere and the characteristics of the city itself. Here the human being is just another aspect of the place where facial features and the streets, the bodies and buildings become indistinguishable with strong East-West overtones.

• Joumana Haddad’s “Living it Up (and Down) in Beirut” (takes place in Beirut, Lebanon)

In a back and forth movement between the main body of the text (written the protagonist’s voice) and the third person footnotes, between the temporal present and past, the story showcases a strange love story that alters East-West spaces and moments in time.

• Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s “There’s No Room for a Lover in this City” (takes place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)

The narrative explores the many contradictions of a city that suffers from the same asphyxiation it inflicts on its own people. Yet a strong wind of change is almost palpable through the writing, while the protagonist struggles to live out what his geography denies him. The protagonist’s clashes with strict Eastern expectations allows him to reimagine the spaces through which he moves.

• Kristina Kahakauwila’s “This is Paradise” (takes place in Honolulu, HI)

The story is told from the perspective of multiple native Hawaiians in different positions: young female surfers, hotel maids, business-women. It shifts abruptly between their experiences, observations, and perspectives of being culturally connected to the island. There is a critique of the tourists and their treatment of the island. While the Hawaiian women represent the Pacific Island/Eastern perspective, the tourists are associated with the long tradition of Western colonization and consumption.

• Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman” (takes place in non-specified Chinese village and in the U.S.)

The un-named narrator recalls the story of a scorned aunt from the ancestral Chinese village told by her mother as a cautionary tale. However, the narrator contemplates the story from the aunt’s point of view and parallels it with her own identity growing up Chinese American in the United States.

• Chang-Rae Lee’s “The Faintest Echo of Our Language” (take place in an unnamed U.S. suburban neighborhood )

This narrative tells the story of a retired Korean American professor who reflects on his life and the memories of his mother, who passed away. He finds solace in the memories of his mother's language and culture, which he feels a deep connection to despite being estranged from it for many years. The story explores themes of identity, family, and the importance of language and culture in shaping one's sense of self.