Ethnic Spectatorship (c. 1976) WHEN I WAS YOUNG, IT SEEMED THAT MOST AMERICANS HAD NEVER HEARD OF BURMA. SINCE COMMUNICATION WITH BURMA WAS constrained, I was curious about its culture, which my family car- ried so near to their hearts. My irst memory of seeing “Burma” in- volved watching he King and I (1956) on television. I was captivated by Rita Moreno playing Tuptim, a Burmese girl who is given to the king of Siam by the prince of Burma and is secretly having an afair with her escort. he new British governess gives Tuptim Uncle Tom’s Cabin to improve her English. he Burmese concubine articulates her frustration by staging an adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel for the king and some European visitors. During the perfor- mance, Tuptim attempts an escape with her Burmese lover. It is no surprise that Tuptim’s play for liberation is thwarted nor that my irst lesson about Burmese femininity was mediated through Hollywood. What I emphasize here is the pedagogical weight and uneven representational efects of displacement. As a Sino-Burmese immigrant, I learned about the country of my birth by watching a Puerto Rican actress playing a Burmese concubine who protests her servitude to an Asian patriarch by transposing a famous novel writ- ten by a white American woman. he Hollywood musical suggests that Burmese women’s resistance cannot manifest itself without the tutelage of a British governess and an ideological frame provided by American women’s abolitionist discourses. As counterpoint to such mass-mediated orientalist representations, this essay focuses on the displaced Burmese woman as author and translator in order to dem- onstrate how modern Burmese women’s literature ofers alternative standpoints on gender and transnational encounters. Journalism and Human Rights (c. 2011) In the new millennium, the human rights spectacle of Burma has gathered critical momentum through various discursive currents. TAMARA C. HO is an assistant professor of women’s studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her recent publica- tions include essays on Burmese immi- grant Buddhism and the gender politics of Burmese supernaturalism. Her work on Wendy Law-Yone has been published in A Resource Guide to Asian American Lit- erature (MLA, 2001), Word Matters: Con- versations with Asian American Authors (U of Hawai‘i P, 2000), and Amerasia Journal. She is at work on a monograph on Bur- mese women’s literature, human rights, and transnational ethical engagement. theories and methodologies Representing Burma: Narrative Displacement and Gender tamara c. ho [ PMLA 662 [ © 2011 by the modern language association of america ]