America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945

by Colleen Lye

What explains the perception of Asians both as economic exemplars and as threats? America's Asia explores a discursive tradition that affiliates the East with modern efficiency, in contrast to more familiar primitivist forms of Orientalism. Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a "model minority" or a "yellow peril"--two aspects of what she calls "Asiatic racial form"-- to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization proceeded in tandem with the nation's neocolonial expansion beyond its continental frontier.


From Progressive efforts to regulate corporate monopoly to New Deal contentions with the crisis of the Great Depression, a particular racial mode of social redress explains why turn-of-the-century radicals and reformers united around Asian exclusion and why Japanese American internment during World War II was a liberal initiative.


In Lye's reconstructed archive of Asian American racialization, literary naturalism and its conventions of representing capitalist abstraction provide key historiographical evidence. Arguing for the profound influence of literature on policymaking, America's Asia examines the relationship between Jack London and leading Progressive George Kennan on U.S.-Japan relations, Frank Norris and AFL leader Samuel Gompers on cheap immigrant labor, Pearl S. Buck and journalist Edgar Snow on the Popular Front in China, and John Steinbeck and left intellectual Carey McWilliams on Japanese American internment. Lye's materialist approach to the construction of race succeeds in locating racialization as part of a wider ideological pattern and in distinguishing between its different, and sometimes opposing, historical effects.

Genres: China

368 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 2004

About the author

Colleen Lye (Ph.D, Columbia) is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, where she teaches courses on 20th and 21st century literature, marxism and postcolonial theory, and Asian American Studies. She is a member of the editorial boards of Representations, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Verge. Besides these venues, her essays and reviews have appeared in Modern Languages Quarterly, South Atlantic Quarterly, American Literature, American Literary History, Interventions, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Public Books and Commune.

Reviews

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect from beginning to end

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A deep literary analysis of representations of Asian Americans.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

As may be expected from the title, a thorough and thought-provoking look at literature.

[QQ · Rating 5 out of 5]

still a banger.