America's Asia : racial form and American literature, 1893-1945 / Colleen Lye.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lye, Colleen, 1967-

Series:

Princeton paperbacks

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

American literature--19th century--History and criticism.

Orientalism.

Relations.

Asia--Foreign public opinion, American.

Asia.

Asia--Relations--United States.

United States.

United States--Relations--Asia.

Asian Americans in literature.

Orientalism--United States.

Orientalism in literature.

Asia--In literature.

Race in literature.

Physical Description:

x, 342 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [2005]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: The Minority Which Is Not One 1

Chapter 1 A Genealogy of the "Yellow Peril" / Jack London, George Kennan, the Russo-Japanese War 12

Chapter 2 Meat versus Rice / Frank Norris, Jack London, the Critique of Monpoloy Capitalism 47

Chapter 3 The End of Asian Exclusion? / Alien Land Law Fiction, The Specter of "Cheap Farmers" 96

Chapter 4 A New Deal for Asians / John Steinbeck, Carey McWilliams, the Liberalism of Japanese-American Internment 141

Chapter 5 One World / Pearl S. Buck, Edgar Snow, John Steinbeck on Asian American Character 204.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [301]-328) and index.

ISBN:

0691114188

0691114196

OCLC:

54931601