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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lye, Colleen, 1967-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

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

American literature.

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

Asian Americans in literature.

Orientalism--United States.

Orientalism.

Orientalism in literature.

Race in literature.

Asia--Foreign public opinion, American.

Asia.

Asia--Relations--United States.

United States--Relations--Asia.

United States.

Asia--In literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (355 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

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:

The minority which is not one

A genealogy of the "yellow peril" / Jack London, George Kenna, and the Russo-Japanese war

Meat versus rice / Frank Norris, Jack London, and the critique of monopoly capitalism

The end of Asian exclusion? / the specter of "cheap farmers" and alien land law fiction

A new deal for Asians / John Steinbeck, Carey McWilliams, and the liberalism of Japanese-American internment

One world / Pearl S. Buck, Edgar Snow, and John Steinbeck on Asian American character.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

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

ISBN:

9786612271373

9781400826438

1400826438

9781282271371

1282271377

OCLC:

436060044