In Karen Tei Yamashita’s National Book Award nominated I Hotel, each chapter is headed by a deconstructed cube featuring a year, a place, a theme, and three names, laid out flat to spatialize the web of cultural and political motifs, physical locations throughout Chinatown and San Francisco, and characters that animate her painstakingly researched reflection on Third World Liberation across the nexus of the I Hotel struggle.

 

For SUPER FLEX, Yamashita presents larger-than-life renderings of the cubes scattered throughout the festival, allowing the novel’s conceptual overlay to reunite with sites integral to its formation.  Whether taken as spatialized diagrams, literary alter egos, conceptual objects, or indexes for transpacific histories of organizing, the structure of the cube encourages visitors to reflect on both the light and shadows of Chinatown and its vitalistic denizens past and present. 

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About Karen Tei Yamashita

Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of nine books, including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and, most recently, Dark Soil, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a U.S. Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, in 2024 Karen was inducted as a Literature Fellow in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

 

Karen Tei Yamashita 山下凱倫，I Hotel

山下凱倫獲美國國家圖書獎提名的作品《I Hotel》裡，每個章節都由一個解構了的小立方起頭，裡面寫著一個年份、一個主題和三個名字，平實地鋪敘一張綿密的網，交織著多個文化和政治母題、華埠和三藩市的真實地點，還有一眾角色，活現她對國際旅館抗爭以及與之相連的第三世界解放運動的精心研究和反思。

 

在「蓄勢待發」藝術節，Yamashita 會將這些立方放大呈現，在藝術節現場四處擺放，讓小說中的概念回歸構成它的現實場景。無論是把這些立方體視為空間化的圖像、文學意義上的另一個自我、概念化的物件，還是對跨空間的組織歷史的索引，這組作品期望鼓勵觀眾反思華埠的光明和陰暗面，以及從前現在棲居於此、生命力旺盛的居民。

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Karen Tei Yamashita 山下凱倫 是位作家，至今已推出九本書籍，包括入圍美國國家圖書獎決選的《I Hotel》以及最新作品《Dark Soil》，全由 Coffee House Press 出版。Karen 榮獲美國國家圖書基金會頒贈的美國文學傑出貢獻終身成就獎、John Dos Passos 文學獎及 U.S. Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship，2024 年獲選為美國藝術與科學學院文學院士。現為加州大學聖克魯斯分校文學及寫作系榮休教授。