The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 17 (2006)

Asian Crossroads/ Transnational
American Studies

Shelley FISHER FISHKIN*

It would be hard to ﬁnd any moment in the history of the U.S. when
products, people, or ideas from Asia did not play a vital role. The
American Revolution? It was 45 tons of tea from China that the Sons of
Liberty, led by John Adams, dumped into the Boston Harbor.1 The
American Renaissance? Emerson and Thoreau were reading and learning from translations of Eastern texts.2 American impressionism? The
most famous works by painter Mary Cassatt are indebted to lessons shelearned from traditions of Japanese printmaking.3 How about Adventuresof Huckleberry Finn, the book which Hemingway claimed gave birth toall 20th century American literature? Twain undertook his ﬁrst experiments with using satire to attack racism when, as a young journalist in
the 1860s, his direct exposes of racism towards the Chinese in San
Francisco were censored.4 Indeed, Asia shaped what would be the U.S.
even before Columbus set sail for the New World—for, as Gary Okihiro
reminds us, “America’s very ‘discovery’ resulted from . . . Europe’s
ancient and persistent search for a passage to Asia.”5 From the start,
Asia—its geography, its people, its products and its culture—was woven
into the very fabric of what made the U.S. what it was.
My own childhood was neither typical nor atypical. It was simply
mine. All of my grandparents immigrated to New York near the start of
Copyright © 2006 Shelley Fisher Fishkin. All rights reserved. This work may be
used, with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of thiswork may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Professor, Stanford University

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SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN

the twentieth century from Jewish shtetls or small towns in Eastern
Europe. But when my mother decided to buy the one antique she everbought, it was an antique Chinese mah jong set—which is now in myliving room. My mother herself didn’t play mah jong. But her mother
did—along with virtually every other Jewish woman of my grandmother’s generation who had immigrated from Eastern Europe, or at least
that’s how it seemed. Why was mah jong such a hugely popular gameamong immigrant Jewish women in America? That’s a mystery I hope
to solve some day. My mother was a musicologist who, as a college professor, taught classes throughout my childhood. But the one class I recall
my mother taking was a class on cultivating miniature bonsai trees that
she took at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens—a place where my playground, on sunny days, was the mall lined with Japanese cherry trees, agift from the people of Japan. As I puzzle over my mother’s passion forthings Chinese and Japanese, I always come back to the notion of how“American” it was for her to love these things. The antique mah jong set,
and the knowledge of how to cultivate a miniature bonsai tree were as
far from the world of the Eastern European shtetl her parents came fromas, well, as far as America was. In America, could her freedom to appreciate and embrace Asian artifacts and practices have been a metonym forthe larger freedoms that my grandparents’ move from the old world tothe new represented? One day when I was four years old, I was cast in
the chorus of a musical production at my summer day-camp. I was justbeginning to learn to read, and as I rode home from camp, I diligently
began to study the words to the song I was told to learn. By the time I
reached my house, I was in tears. What’s wrong, my mother asked. “I’llnever learn to read” I wailed. “I can read the words but I can’t ﬁgure out
what they mean!” I sobbed, as I read from the sheet: “Miya sama, miyasama / On n’m-ma no mayé ni / Pira-Pira suru no wa / Nan gia na / Toko
tonyaré tonyaré na?” My mother glanced over my shoulder at the mimeographed sheet I was reading from and suppressed a smile. “Darling,
you read that beautifully,” she said. “No wonder you don’t know what
the words mean. They’re Japanese!”6 The show, of course, was Gilbert
and Sullivan’s “Mikado.” Why was a four-year old little girl at a day
camp based at a Jewish center in upstate New York in the 1950s being
asked to learn a Japanese war song from 1868 in a musical written by
two Englishmen? Some day, I hope to ﬁgure out some answers to thisquestion.

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES7

For a very long time, Americans’ negotiation of their relationship to
people and things Asian have helped them gain a sense of what it means
to be American. U.S. culture has left its mark on Asian cultures, as well,
shaping everything from the Japanese language, to Chinese poetry toThai Buddhism.7 In the 21st century, we are increasingly recognizing that
understanding these moments of interaction, intersection, contact, conﬂict, appropriation, appreciation, synergy, and synapse—conscious or
unconscious, familiar or fresh—is a key part of our task as scholars in
American Studies. Understanding the cultural crossroads of the U.S. andAsia that shape our world is increasingly central to what it means to bea scholar of American Studies today.
The ﬁeld of American Studies has been dramatically transformed overthe last four decades as scholars recovered the voices of women andminorities, and replaced earlier exceptionalist visions of unsullied innocence with a clear-eyed look at the lust for empire that America sharedwith other western powers. But the national paradigm of the U.S. as aclearly-bordered geographical and political space remained intact: theworld was still divided into “us” and “them,” the “domestic” and the“foreign,” the “national” and “international.” The complexity of our ﬁeldof study as we understand it today, however, encourages us to pay asmuch attention to the ways in which ideas, people, objects, culture andcapital, have circulated and continue to circulate physically, and virtually, throughout the world, both in ways we might expect, and unpredictably. It requires that we view America, as David Palumbo-Liu put it,
as a place “always in process itself.”8 It requires that we see the insideand outside, domestic and foreign, national and international as interpenetrating.9
I do not want to suggest that everyone needs to do transnational work,or that other work is not equally important. Japanese scholars, for example have done impressive work on Mark Twain that does not have atransnational focus, but that has added much to our understanding of thiscomplex author—such as professor Makoto Nagawara’s memorable
study of “A True Story.”10 Japanese scholars have also done important
historical research that is not speciﬁcally transnational. (Yasuhiro
Katagiri’s recent prizewinning book, The Mississippi State Sovereignty
Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights comes to mind.)11 And
Chinese and Taiwanese scholars have done useful work on Native
American and African American literature that is not transnational in8

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN

focus (Wang Jianping’s work on Louise Erdrich, comes to mind, alongwith Liang-ya Liou’s work on Toni Morrison).12 There is still much valuable work to be done in American Studies that does not deal with thetransnational. But what I do want to do is concentrate in a positive way
on what I see as a major shift in the ﬁeld.
My comments here build on those of others who have theorized in articles and books about the need for seeing “America,” as Paul Lauter put
it, as part of “a world system, in which the exchange of commodities,
the ﬂow of capital, and the iterations of cultures know no borders.”13
Over the last ten years a web of contact zones has increasingly superceded “the nation” as “the basic unit of, and frame for, analysis.”14 Taking cues from borderlands scholars like José David Saldívar who focus
on spaces that resist being reduced to a “national tradition,” scholars are
increasingly paying attention to the ways in which analogous hybridities
and ﬂuidities shape other spaces less territorially and culturally “stable”
than we may have thought.15 My focus here will be Asian crossroads—
points of connection and exchange with Japan, Taiwan, China, Korea,
the Philippines, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and other Asian
nations. What topics and questions become salient if we reconceive ourﬁeld with the transnational at its center, as many scholars are currently
doing? What roles might comparative, collaborative, border-crossing
research play in this reconﬁgured ﬁeld?16
As the transnational becomes more central to American Studies, weare likely to be more attentive to the ways in which the multidirectional
ﬂow of people, ideas, and goods between the U.S. and Asia have shaped
an unexpectedly broad range of topics in the ﬁeld. Take a seemingly
unrelated issue like the status of Mexican-Americans in the Southwest.
Recent work by scholars like Henry Yu and Mai Ngai demonstrates that
Asian crossroads have much more to do with this issue than we may havepreviously thought. In his illuminating article “Los Angeles andAmerican Studies in a Paciﬁc World of Migrations,” in American
Quarterly last fall, Henry Yu notes that “By the mid-twentieth century,
Mexican labor
migrations had come to replace the supply of Chinese, Japanese, Korean,
Punjabi, and Filipinos cut off by exclusionary policies, and the racializationof Mexicans as eternal foreigners and cheap labor grafted onto similar representations of earlier Asian migrants. In similar ways that antiblack politics
helped amalgamate various Europeans into a common white supremacy, antiAsian and anti-Mexican politics achieved a parallel result.

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

9

Yu shows us that “Without an understanding of the consequences ofregional networks of migration that brought migrants from Asia” as well
as from “Europe, Latin America, and the Eastern United States to the
Paciﬁc coast, the very different patterns of regional racialization in the
United States do not make sense.”17 Mae Ngai charts related territory inher book Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern
America, an ambitious investigation of race, labor, immigration and citizenship—work which builds on Lisa Lowe’s overview of the history ofAmerica’s anti-Asian exclusionary policies in Immigrant Acts.18 It turns
out that the history of U.S. immigration policy and practice in relation
to Asians had a lasting impact on both responses to immigrants from a
range of other parts of the world, as well, and on the conditions that immigrants encountered once they were here. The racialization of Mexicans
and Mexican-Americans in California as well as the complex associations Americans have with the idea of “illegal aliens”are informed in
key ways by the history of earlier racism towards Chinese, Japanese,
Koreans, and Filipinos.
The ways in which race has inﬂected concepts of nationhood and citizenship have long been central to work in American Studies, but for
decades this topics was constructed principally in the context of blackwhite relations in a transatlantic world. Today a number of scholars arereshaping these questions from a transpaciﬁc perspective. The result isa fuller and more nuanced understanding of both the past and the present.
Intertwined issues of race and citizenship, of nation, gender, and the
racialized body are being illuminated in fresh ways these days by critics
who study the ways in which Americans of Asian descent have challenged and reshaped constructions of what an “American citizen” looks
like and how individuals are “constructed” by the state. Books that mine
this terrain include Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Race & Resistance: Literatureand Politics in Asian America, David Lei Li’s Imagining the Nation,
Jinqi Ling’s Narrating Nationalisms, Elena Tajima Creef’s, Imaging
Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, andthe Body, and Patricia Chu’s Assimilating Asians, as well as Moon-Ho
Jung’s recent American Quarterly article, “Outlawing ‘Coolies’: Race,
Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emanicipation” (All of these works
extend comments Gary Okihiro made on this topic in Margins andMainstreams).19 (Interestingly, scholars based in both Asia and the U.S.
are also increasingly exploring issues of race in the U.S. that movebeyond black-white or yellow-white dyadic constructions. Kun Jong

10

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN

Lee, for example, has examined responses to African-Americans in
Korean American literature, while Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong has exploredthe role of African-Americans in Sinophone Chinese American literature and Yukiko Koshiro has examined the impact of African Americans
on Japan.)20
While issues involving immigration have long been important to muchwork in American Studies, as the transnational becomes more central tothe ﬁeld, we are likely to focus not only on the proverbial immigrant who
leaves somewhere called “home” to make a new home in the U.S., butalso on the endless process of comings and goings that create familial,
cultural, linguistic and economic ties across national borders.21 Theseborder-crossing ties are the focus of Madeline Hsu’s ambitious book,
Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration
Between the U.S. and South China, 1882–1943, which uses Chinese- andEnglish-language sources to track the strong sense of connection thatlinked U.S. immigrants to family and friends back in China during theexclusion era.22 They are also central to Xiao-huang Yin’s study ofChinese American philanthropy to China, and of the essays collected ina recently-published anthology focused on transnational networks andtrans-paciﬁc interactions between China and Chinese America.23
From the Philippine-American war to World War II to debates about
U.S. bases in Asia today, military actions and encounters have createdcrossroads and contact zones. As the transnational becomes more central
to American Studies, scholars are examining those spaces and momentsfrom multiple perspectives, yielding more complex insights than we had
before. The Philippine-American War, for example, was a key turning
point in the career of Mark Twain, prompting a major re-evaluation ofsuch issues as his nation’s role in the world, the relationship between
religion and foreign policy, the nature of imperialism, and the seductionsof white supremacy. Twain’s writings on this war, while not totallyburied, have been largely neglected, and their broader signiﬁcance has
generally not been examined.24 One particularly important piece that thewar prompted him to write was “The War Prayer,” a devastatingly clearsighted and brutal fable of the role of religion in war that has received
almost no critical attention. Takayuki Tatsumi and I are co-editing aninternational forum on the “War Prayer” that will appear in the Japanesejournal Mark Twain Studies. Other American Studies scholars, as well,
are increasingly recognizing the value of seeking multiple perspectives
on military actions that have brought the U.S. and Asian nations into con-

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

11tact and conﬂict. The recent impressive anthology Vestiges of War: The
Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream,
1899–1999 edited by Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, forexample, brings together both U.S. and Filipino perspectives on the warthat so disillusioned Mark Twain about his country’s role in the world.25
A massive anthology like this one, however, is not the only place that
dissonant voices may be brought together, as Gordon Chang demonstrated in his article about the U.S.-Korean war of 1871 that he was able
to write after consulting both Korean and U.S. archives: each side accused the other of barbarism and treachery, each side discharged significant ﬁrepower (although the U.S. more than the Koreans), and then eachside declared victory and went home.26
Chang’s 2003 article in the Journal of American History entitled“Whose ‘Barbarism?’ Whose ‘Treachery’? Race and Civilization in the
Unknown United States-Korea War of 1871” focuses on a “battle
between American and Korean military forces in June 1871 near Korea’sRock of Gibraltar, during an American expedition to ‘open’ Korea as
Matthew C. Perry had opened Japan in 1853.” He notes that “the standard American interpretation of the war differs dramatically from the
Korean, with the differences having everything to do with national perspective rather than with ‘facts’ alone. The nationality of the storyteller
commonly predicts which side will be identiﬁed as the ‘aggressor’ andwhich the ‘defender’ in the conﬂict.” In this particular case, “each side
has claimed glorious victory over a demoralized enemy. Each side has
built its own version of a victory column at home and honored its martyrs as national heroes. . . . [Few] if any, American students (and only asmall minority of American diplomatic historians) know anything about
the 1871 events in Korea. It is, for Americans today, an unknown war.
(Those who know of the incident may have read articles entitled ‘Our
Little War with the Heathens,’ ‘America’s War with the Hermits,’ or perhaps ‘When We Trounced Korea,’ the dismissive titles themselves
reﬂecting a common historical attitude toward the Asian enemy.) In contrast to their American counterparts, most Koreans, in the south as wellas the north, are familiar with the outlines of the Shin-mi Yang-yo (thebarbarian incursion of 1871, a name suggestive of attitudes toward theWestern adversary) and with the valiant Korean resistance to the aggression. A respected Korean scholar, Dae-Sook Suh, eulogizes the war as‘one of the bloodiest battles that Koreans have fought to defend theircountry.’ ”27 (Despite articles like this one, I might add, the U.S is behind12SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN

the curve when it comes to melding multiple national narratives aboutwars in Asia. Historians in China, Korea and Japan have just completed
a new text book, which has been published in Chinese, Korean andJapanese—but not translated into English—which is the result of a collaboration among historians from all three countries to jointly write thehistory of World War II in Asia. When different national versions conﬂict with one another, the book acknowledges that fact. I’m eagerly waiting to read forthcoming English-language articles about this project that
Julie Higashi is completing).
As the transnational becomes more central to American Studies, We
are likely to focus less on the U.S. as a static and stable territory and population whose most characteristic traits it was our job to divine, and moreon the nation as a participant in a global ﬂow of people, ideas, texts andproducts. As Lisa Lowe observes, “the sweatshops of the garment industry located in San Francisco and Los Angeles . . . employ immigrant
women from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Hong Kong, South
Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines, while in these countries of origin,
U.S. transnational corporations are also conducting garment assembly
work.”28 Despite “national, cultural and linguistic differences,” Lowewrites, “there are material continuities between the conditions ofChicanas and Latinas working in the United States and the women
working in maquiladoras and low-cost manufacturing zones in Latin
America, and Asian women working both within the United States andin Asian zones of assembly and manufacturing.”29 Those continuities
require that our research cross borders as readily as consumer goods do.
Some examples of research that does this are articles like “Si(gh)ting
Asian/American women as transnational labor,” by Laura Hyun- Yi
Kang and “(Dis)assembling Rights of Women Workers Along the
Global Assembly Line: Human Rights and the Garment Industry” by
Laura Ho, Catherine Powell, and Leti Volpp.30
As the transnational becomes increasingly central to American Studies, we may well seek to recover chapters of the past that have eluded
any archive despite their importance. For example, in Mark Twain’s
powerful satire on racism toward the Chinese serialized in 1870 and
1871, a ﬁctional immigrant in California named Ah Song-Hi writes to
his friend Ching-Foo back in China. Twain makes it clear that his narrative of the treatment of the Chinese in the U.S. was based on his observations of real people.31 But where are the voices of the real Ah Song-Hi
and his brothers? Many of the immigrants were illiterate, but some of

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

13them probably dictated letters through literate scribes and sent themhome to China—which is where they stayed. To the best of our knowledge, no library in the U.S. has even a photocopy of a letter sent to China
by anyone who worked on the railroad.32 Are there caches of family
papers in Guangdong Province where one might ﬁnd some of these letters? My university was founded with the fortune that Leland Stanford
made from railroads largely built by Chinese workers—but those workers’ voices have yet to be recovered. If such letters are an example ofprimary sources that have eluded any archive, there are other sources
readily available in China that Americanists in China are positioned torecover, translate and analyze. For example, the U.S. decision in 1904
to extend indeﬁnitely the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that made theChinese ineligible for citizenship sparked not only a massive boycott of
U.S. goods the following year in China, but also a vast body of Chinese
protest literature. In 1960 a huge, multigenre compilation of this literature was published in China. But to this day only one small excerpt fromthis compilation has been translated into English. Still untranslated isKuxuesheng, a novella written in Chinese set in Chinese America that
predates the book widely considered the ﬁrst Chinese American novel
set in Chinese America by more than half a century.33 Kuxuesheng, as
Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong tells us, is a well-crafted novella about a “patriotic student who travels to America in order to acquire the knowledge
needed to save his crumbling country from corrupt Manchu rule as wellas economic and military invasion by foreign powers.” As Wong notes,“Before the protagonist returns home, he receives help from an extraordinary old man, a wealthy Chinese immigrant who has managed to create
his own utopian estate in an inhospitable, often overtly racist, society.”34
Chinese Americanists I met at the ﬁrst American Studies Network conference in Shanghai in June, 2004 tittered with amusement when they
heard that to the extent that Americans had heard of this book, it was
known as The Industrious Student. They said a more accurate translation of the title would be The Bitter Student. The novella could provide
a fascinating glimpse of one writer’s vision of how one might meld
Chinese and American identities at the dawn of the twentieth century.35
Perhaps a collaboration between scholars based in China and the U.S.
would allow the book to be translated and contextualized as a potentially
important work in American Studies.36 Xiao-huang Yin’s monograph,
Chinese American Literature Since the 1850s, draws our attention toother examples of American literature in Chinese that we have yet to14

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN

fully assimilate into American Studies.37 Yin’s illuminating discussionof Chinese American writing in Chinese and in English, and the history
that shaped that work, provides important insights into writers who
sometimes wrote in both languages and the often quite different audiences they addressed in each. The result is an invaluable contribution to
our understanding of a neglected chapter of American literary history in
all its complexity.38
Another early excellent model of the recovery of Chinese-language
American literature is edited by Mark Him Lai, Genny Lim and Judy
Yung.39 These books are exemplars of the move to pay attention to thatneglected body of American literature that was written in languages otherthan English—a trend that led to books like the pioneering Multilingual
Anthology of American Literature edited by Mark Shell and Werner
Sollors and the collection of essays Sollors edited entitled Multilingual
America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity and the Languages of American
Literature, which pointed to some of the intriguing places that attention
to this neglected body of literature can take us if we recognize that insistence on “English Only” has as little place in our scholarship as it does
elsewhere in our society.40 Despite the increased attention devoted in the
U.S. to this body of material, there are still many gaps to ﬁll, and much
important work to be done. For example, the Multilingual Anthology ofAmerican Literature is ambitious and broad-ranging; but it contains noselection that originally appeared in Korean. As it turns out, there is asizeable body of American literature written in Korean, that has neverbeen translated. When I visited his ofﬁce at Korea University, Kun Jong
Lee showed me six volumes of Korean-American literature written
before 1945 anthologized by Kyuick Cho and published in Seoul in
1999.41
American literature continues to be written today in languages otherthan English, and scholars based outside the U.S. are playing a key rolein interpreting that literature. Pin-chia Feng’s fascinating 2000 essay on
Yan Geling’s novel, Fu Sang, is a case in point.42 The education of
Shanghai-born Yan Geling in China was disrupted by the Cultural Revolution; at age 13 she was sent to Chengdu, Sichuan Province, with thePeople’s Liberation Army. She later studied at Beijing University, but
after the Tiananman Square events of 1989, she ﬂed to the U.S. to study
at Columbia University, where she is completing an MFA in Fiction
Writing. She was an accomplished ﬁction-writer in Chinese before she
began studying English in her thirties, and some of the more than 20 shortstory collections, novellas and screenplays she has written in Chinese

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

15

have garnered major literary awards in both Taiwan (where many wereﬁrst published) as well as mainland China.43 Although her most acclaimed novel, Fu Sang, was published in Chinese in Taiwan in 1996, it
was not translated into English and published in the U.S. until 2001,
when it appeared under the title The Lost Daughter of Happiness, translated by Cathy Silber. An epic tale about a young Chinese woman who
is kidnapped in China in the 1860s and sold into prostitution in San
Francisco’s Chinatown, the book (inspired by a real historical ﬁgure)explores an interracial love story against the backdrop of racism towards
the Chinese in 19th-century San Francisco; it promptly rose to prominence on the New York Times Bestseller list.44 A year before this novel
appeared in English, however Pin-chia Feng, a Taiwanese Americanist,
introduced the book to English-speaking scholars in an article in
American Studies International that included her own translations ofextended passages from the novel and ﬂagged its signiﬁcance for
American literary studies.
Feng observes that “Since Yan has won many Taiwanese awards after
her immigration in 1989, a fact that makes her one of the stars of theisland’s literary scene, it has become increasingly difﬁcult to label her
in terms of geographical location and language.” She goes on to ask, “Is
she still a mainlander writer? Is she a Taiwanese writer? Or is she now
an Asian American writer?” Feng argues compellingly that the “complicated political and linguistic issues inside the text and behind the writing and publishing of Fu Sang make it a signiﬁcant text in terms of
re-mapping Asian American literature.45 Some of these theoretical issues
had emerged, as well in an insightful article that included a discussionof Yan Geling by Taiwanese scholar Te-hsing Shan that appeared in
Multilingual America two years before Feng’s article appeared (an article that Feng cites).46 But Feng’s essay, which focuses speciﬁcally on Fu
Sang, and includes substantial passages from the novel translated byFeng into English, manages to dramatize these issues for the English
reader in ways that Shan’s equally useful but more theoretical article did
not. Even now, when the novel is widely available to English readers.
there are still dimensions of it that this essay by a Taiwan-based, Chinesespeaking critic like Feng can illuminate in distinctive ways. For example,
Feng’s 2000 article about the Taiwan publication of the book included
an extended discussion of the signiﬁcance of the iconography of the illustrations on the front and back covers of the book, noting that the illustrator has skillfully managed to “translate for us what has happened
inside the text with visual language,” underlining the metamorphosis

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undergone by it’s eponymous heroine, and also highlighting thecharacter’s “transformation in terms of spatial location,” probing her
relation to the geographical spaces of both China and San Francisco’s
Chinatown. These illustrations, which Feng describes in detail, are notavailable to readers of the English-language editions of the novel thatcame out subsequently: the book’s British and U.S. publishers, presumably with their eyes on local markets, each selected different cover art.47
Our understanding of the multicultural and multilingual traditions that
inform American literature written in English, as well, can be greatly enriched by border-crossing scholarship. For example, Sanehide Kodama’s
knowledge of Japanese, Chinese and English allow him to provide fresh
insights into American writers’ use (and alleged misuse) of Chinese andJapanese sources in his book American Poetry and Japanese Culture.48
Meanwhile, Kun Jong Lee’s work on the role of Korean shamanistic traditions as a context for Nora Okja Keller’s novel Comfort Woman, as
well as Sung-Ae Lee’s examination of common cultural threads linking
four recent novels by Korean-American women writers, remind us of theimportance of being conversant with Korean religious, linguistic, socialand cultural traditions if one wants to understand the English-language
literature of Korean America.49 What role does literature by KoreanAmericans play in Korea? What kinds of diasporic dialogue between thetwo countries is going on among contemporary writers and readers?
Analogous questions might be asked about authors writing other diasporas, as well. For example, Niaz Zaman’s study of Pakistani responses
to work by Pakistani-American writer Bapsi Sidhwa comes to mind. In
an article titled “The Americanization of Bapsi Sidhwa,” Bangladesh
Journal of American Studies, Zaman explores what Pakistani readerstake from novels set in the U.S. by a writer whom Zaman considers “theforemost Pakistani novelist writing in English,” who now lives andwrites in the U.S. Zaman notes the ways in which Sidhwa’s novel An
American Brat “introduces Jews and the rituals of Judaism to her
Pakistani readers,” and also “introduces the subject of lesbianism, a subject that in the sub-continent ‘nice’ girls don’t talk about.”50
American writers with Chinese roots who write in English are increasingly being translated into Chinese, facilitating cross-border conversations with readers and critics in China and Taiwan. During recent years:
Amy Tan, Shawn Wong, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim are a few of the writers who have been translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan.51
Taiwan’s ﬁrst English-language monograph on Chinese American liter-

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

17

ature, Mao-chu Lin’s Frank Chin Writes Back, appeared in 1997.52 Other
recent works include Joan Chung-Heui Chang’s Transforming Chinese
American Literature: A Study of History, Sexuality, and Ethnicity (2000)
and Pin-Chia Feng’s En-Gendering Chinese Americas: Reading Chinese
American Women’s Fiction (2001).53 Many other critical studies ofChinese American literature have been published in Taiwan in Chinesesince the mid-1990s.54 Critical studies of Japanese American writers
have been published in both English and Japanese for a number of years,
as well, by Japanese Americanists. Some critics—Kyoko Norma Nozaki,
for example—publish studies of Japanese American writers in both
Japanese and English (her book, Singing My Own Song (2000), a studyof Janice Mirikitani, Joy Kogawa, and Kyoko Mori, was published in
English, while her books Asian American Literature: Treading Past,
Present and Future (2001) and Reading Japanese American Literature:
The Legacy of Three Generations (1997) are in Japanese.)55
Asian American writers by deﬁnition embrace dual traditions—forms
and themes they inherit from their precursors in American literature, andforms and themes drawn from their own or their forebears’ experiencesin Asia. As the transnational becomes more salient in American Studies,
we will appreciate the beneﬁts of interleaving and interweaving perspectives of Asia-based critics of their work with those of U.S.-based
critics. In her recent essay entitled “When Asian American Literature
Leaves Home,” Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong outlines a rather dizzying arrayof new publications on Asian American literature from scholars basedin Asia and in Europe. She writes that two Japanese scholars, “Teruyo
Ueki and Fukuko Kobayashi, have edited an anthology of Chinese
American women’s writing annotated in Japanese” and notes that “In
Taiwan, the Institute of European and American Studies of the Academia
Sinica has been holding biennial conferences on Chinese American
literature since 1991 and publishing selected papers. . . .”56 And if
Japanese critics are publishing work on Chinese American writers, someTaiwanese critics, such as Su-ching Huang, are publishing work on
Japanese American writers.57 Although the U.S. may have been the siteof the ﬁrst wave of writing on Asian American literature, much of thatwork is now going on outside the U.S., particularly in Asia, with each
community of scholars framing its own distinctive approaches to theﬁeld.58
Since the early 90s, it has been clear that new critical questions canemerge when Asian scholars encounter Asian American literature.

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Chinese readers of Maxine Hong Kingston and David Hwang, as John
Deeney observed, expressed distress at these writers’ lack of familiarity
with Chinese language and cultural traditions; furthermore, in their candor on topics such as colonial subjugation and sexism, Sau-ling Wong
notes, these authors were seen as “literary laundrymen and women from
Chinatown exposing their culture’s dirty linen in public.” They saw theirwriting “as a national disgrace for China and almost as a personalaffront.”59 One text can have very different meanings depending onwhether it is viewed as an embarrassing milepost in literature of theChinese diaspora, or whether it is viewed as a bold and enterprising
appropriation and extension of U.S. literary traditions. The name of thecentral character in Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey, His Fake
Book—Wittman Ah Sing—gestures to both sides of the Paciﬁc. Is thebook handling Chinese literary traditions reductively, or embracing
American literary traditions expansively? Or both? When I interviewed
Kingston shortly after Tripmaster Monkey, His Fake Book came out, sheemphasized her view of herself as an American writer, an heir to Walt
Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Yet readers in China saw her asa writer creating literature of the Chinese diaspora.60 Can one text be allof the above? Of course. Think of the optical illusion in which a ﬁgure
is both a wine glass, on one view, and two people’s proﬁles, on anotherview. The image is the same. Our frame of reference for “reading” it isdifferent. A similar process is at play when an Asian-American text isread in Asian or American contexts. Sau-ling Wong observes, for example, that “certain seemingly familiar details related to Chinese culture inFrank Chin’s works are, in a sense, faux amis or false cognates. Theirsuperﬁcial familiarity obscures the entire social, cultural and politicalmatrix out of which the author operates and which profoundly alters their
meaning. It is one thing for a Chinese living in Hong Kong to say Goong
Hay Fat Choy to his friends at Chinese New Year. It is quite another for
Donald Duk, the juvenile protagonist in Frank Chin’s eponymous novel,
to be made to say Goong Hay Fat Choy in front of an Orientalist fetishistof a teacher and a class of white boys ready to mock his foreignness (Chin1991, p. 34).”61 The status of a text itself can also change as it crosses
borders. Chih-ming Wang reminds us, for example, that “as a subcategoryof American literature, Chinese American literature, though situated inUS’s socio-cultural margins, becomes the mainstream after being transported across the Paciﬁc. While the content is supposedly ‘Chinese,’ its
style, language, and messages are unmistakably ‘American.’ ”62 Intrigu-

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ing issues like these will continue to surface as border-crossing scholars
and texts draw our attention.
As the transnational becomes more central to American Studies, wewill pay more attention to ﬁgures and texts who have been marginalized
precisely because they crossed so many borders that they are hard to categorize. One key ﬁgure is Amérigo Paredes, a writer from the TexasMexico borderlands who has become increasingly canonical in Chicano
studies in the U.S. for brilliant and innovative works of folklore and ﬁction. But as Ramón Saldívar demonstrates in his book Borderlands ofCulture, which will be out in 2006, it was Paredes’ experiences as ajournalist in Asia that seminally shaped his ideas about citizenship andbelonging. In his “writings from the Far East as a reporter [for Paciﬁc
Stars and Stripes] and member of the U.S. army of occupation in Japan,”
Saldívar tells us, Paredes explored ideas that indelibly shaped the folkore
and ﬁction he wrote later. Occupied Japan offered him “an enormously
fertile testing ground for his developing ideas on the relationships
between culture, language, ethnicity, race, and national afﬁliation.” As
he watched a nation negotiate the challenges of an era that, as Saldívar
tells us, the Japanese “came to call ‘the confusion era,’ ” as he watched
American and Japanese interact in new and unpredictable ways, themeeting of cultures that he witnessed and wrote about gave him a framework of thought that he would later apply to his work on the dynamics
of the hybrid culture in which he grew up along the Texas-Mexico
border.63
Saldívar tells us that “In all of his writings from postwar Japan,
Paredes attempts to capture the despair of the exhausted and impoverished Japanese, their anguish and regret mixed with the birth of hope instrange new forms, in their sense of relief and simple joy at what Dowerhas called ‘the unexpected surcease of misery and death’ that came withthe end of the war (Dower, Embracing Defeat, 38). What would this new
postwar Asian world under American occupation look like? What shapewould its political forms and social traditions take? How would its language, media, and arts evolve? What would it be like to live in a homeland suddenly inundated with white men who were now quietly but
unmistakably in control? Who were these new Japanese? Paredes’ dispatches from the Occupation frontline [addressed] all of these questions.” Saldívar’s book, a superb example of transnational American
Studies at its best, asks the question, of how Paredes’ “experiences as an
American soldier, journalist, and humanitarian aid worker” in post-war

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Japan “affect his understanding of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.”
Saldívar argues persuasively that this new transnational world that he
was documenting in Japan afforded Paredes “a site from which to revise,refashion, and energize his consolidating understanding of the nature ofcultural difference and of life in the borderlands of the postwar intercultural contact zones” that would inform his understanding of the borderlands in which he’d grown up.
Saldívar’s forthcoming book also reminds us of the pleasures of
pursuing transnational American studies from a hemispheric rather than
U.S.-centric standpoint when he recounts Paredes’ experience of hearing a Geisha “sing, in Japanese, of all things, ‘Lamento Gitano’ (Gypsy
Lament) a bolero by one of the greatest Mexican popular composers ofthe mid-century, María Grever.”64 The geisha, as well as all assembled,refused to believe that the song wasn’t originally written in Japanese.
“Unable to persuade his hosts,” Paredes “sings the Spanish lyrics of‘Lamento Gitano.’ ” “How beautiful,” says his host, “And how odd thata Japanese song has been translated into Spanish. . . .” Back in Tokyo a
few days later, he writes, “strolling the Ginza and browsing the black
market stalls in search of a guitar . . . he comes across the sheet musicfor Lamento Gitano, in Japanese, translated into English, advertised as
an American tune.” Noting that “Cultural interaction is not simply a oneway street,” Saldívar tells us that “Paredes makes the point that as much
as Japan was beginning a process of Americanization, an equally necessary Japanization of American forms and ideas was underway.”
Another hard-to-categorize border-crossing ﬁgure—this time someone who crossed in the opposite direction from Paredes—is Ayako
Ishigaki, a Japanese feminist writer and activist whose 1940 memoir
Restless Wave: My Life in Two Worlds, the ﬁrst book written in English
by a Japanese woman, was recently republished and recovered by YiChun Tricia Lin and Greg Robinson, with an instructive afterword.
Ishigaki immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s, and in the 20s and 30s interpreted Japanese culture for Americans; then, when she returns to Japan
during the Occupation, she interprets American culture for the Japanese.
But if her exposure to American democratic ideals spurs her to an early
critique of Japanese militarism, her awareness of the gaps between theideals of democracy and the practice of it in the U.S.—particularly theracism that it tolerates—prompt her to share with her fellow-Japanese a
sharp critique of the moral failings of postwar America. Paredes andIshigaki, border-crossers whose insights were shaped by their move-

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ments between Asia and the U.S., deserve more attention as the ﬁeld of
American Studies takes a transnational turn.65
And if border-crossing individuals are receiving more attention, so are
the border-crossing implications of American laws. The September 2005
issue of American Quarterly, for example, whose focus is legal borderlands, includes a fascinating article by Teemu Ruskola entitled, “Canton
Is Not Boston: The Invention of American Imperial Sovereignty,” which
illuminates a little-known chapter of what Ruskola refers to as non-territorial American legal imperialism.66 The assumption that Americans,even when they were in China, could not possibly be held subject toChinese law led to the creation in 1906 of “United States Court for
China.” Any American accused of committing a crime against a Chinese
person in China was triable “only by the consul or any other public functionary of the United States thereto authorised according to the laws of
the United States.” Appeals from the court were directed to the Ninth
Judicial Circuit in San Francisco, with further appeals to the UnitedStates Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.67 Ruskola brings to life thisburied chapter of American legal history, when the U.S. Court of China,
whose jurisdictional borders were contiguous with that of the Empire of
China, was described, by one of its judges, as “territorially the largest
district of our Federal Court system.” Sometimes the U.S. legal system
had an unexpected indirect impact on an Asian society. Danika MedakSaltzman, for example, is investigating how U.S. legislation regarding
Indian land—speciﬁcally the Dawes Act of 1887, which created the allotment system—may have inﬂuenced the Japanese government’s treatment of its own indigenous people. Her dissertation entitled Colonial
Reaches, Indigenous Erasure: Indian Policy and Uncle Sam’s Hand inJapan’s “Expansion” into Ainu Lands and Lives (1854–1912), examines“the hypothesis that Japan sought American expertise when deciding totake over the homelands of the Indigenous Ainu people and lay claim to
Hokkaido, the now northernmost island of Japan.” It will endeavor toshow “how the United States exported its American Indian Policy in general, and the Dawes Act in particular, to aid Japan in its colonization
efforts.”68
The impact of the U.S. military, as well as the U.S. legal system onsocieties around the world when it’s off duty as well as on-duty, is likely
to be studied increasingly, as well, as transnational concerns play anincreasing role in scholars’ research agendas. The contact zones surrounding U.S. military bases are addressed in Beyond the Shadow of22

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Camptown by Ji-Yeon Yuh and Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution
and the U.S. Military in Asia by Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda
Stoltzfus.69
Bringing the transnational into American Studies creates space for thecomparative study of a range of social justice movements in different
locations: Ryoko Kurihara’s comparative work on the U.S. and Japanese
suffrage movements, comes to mind, and Laura Hein’s comparative discussion of reparations movements in Japan and the U.S.70 The transnational turn in American Studies also invites us to examine issues of publicmemory in comparative perspective, examining the ways in which the
public memory of transnational episodes in America’s past is constructed through commemoration, monument and historical narrative.71
Several recent books have focused attention, for example, on challenges
facing American efforts to memorialize the internment experience. Elena
Tajima Creef’s book Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body, probes these challenges in useful detail, and this topic is also the subject of Marita Sturken’s essay,“Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the JapaneseInternment” in the book Perilous Memories edited by Fujitani, White,
and Yoneyama. As the book Perilous Memories makes clear, the U.S. is
not the only nation struggling with how to address painful, conﬂict-ridden chapters of the past involving World War II. In the U.S., these struggles have taken shape over controversies surrounding the Enola Gay
exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, and theexhibition on “America’s Concentration Camps” at the Japanese American
National Museum in Los Angeles.72 But the larger issue of who gets towrite the narrative of World War II is the same one that has animatedconﬂicts over the treatment of this history in classrooms in both countries. In Japan, the controversies over textbooks have arisen from thepost-War era through the present.73 In the U.S. these controversies may
be a bit more recent. But when a school district in the state of Washington
state was accused of whitewashing the internment experience last year,
and when a journalists asserted that the internment was actually a goodthing, long-simmering tensions began to explode.74 How are painful andoften embarrassing chapters of history best dealt with in history textbooks, monuments, and museums?75 Perhaps the transnational turn in
American Studies will foster more comparative examinations of theseissues, exploring ways in which textbooks in both countries have dealt
with phenomena such as the U.S. imperialist designs on the Philippines

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and Japan’s imperialist designs on China and Korea; or the U.S.’s displacement of thousands of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II and Japan’s use of Korean women as “comfort women”
for Japanese soldiers in that era. A comparative study of how both democratic nations have handled the challenge of redress, reparation and apology for past injustice would be likely to yield instructive perspectives on
the battles over history on both sides of the Paciﬁc.76
As the transnational grows more central to American Studies we will
welcome investigations of the broad array of cultural crossroads shaping
the work of border-crossing authors, artists and cultural forms that straddles multiple regional and national traditions. One example from literature is Ursula Heise’s recent look at the ways in which novels by Karen
Tei Yamashita, a Japanese American writer who spent almost a decadein Brazil, “weave their storylines around transfers and migrations between the United States, Latin America and Japan and draw on North
American multicultural writing and Latin American magical realism aswell as, to a lesser extent on the techno-postmodernism that ﬂourishedin both the U.S. and Japan from the 1980s onward.”77 Another example
is the body of criticism that has grown about Dictée by Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha. Critical studies by Elaine Kim, Laura Kang, Fukuko
Kobayashi, Kun Jong Lee, and others have helped us understand thismultilingual, border-crossing text that includes, in addition to English,
bits of Chinese, Japanese, French, Greek, Latin and Han-gul, and thatwas shaped by the author’s encounter, as Kobayashi puts it, with
“Japanese colonialism, Korean militarism, U. S. imperialistic intervention into Korea leading to the Korean War and the country’s subsequentdivision into North and South, Cha’s immigration with her mother to
Hawaii and to California, where she was to undergo the common processof assimilation, her graduate study in France, and her sojourn in Korea,
where she was treated as a cultural Other.”78
As the transnational grows more central to American Studies, we will
also pay more attention to contemporary border-crossing ﬁgures in thevisual arts like those included in the exhibit “On the Edge: Contemporary
Chinese Artists Encounter the West” organized by and mounted at
Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University in 2005. The
stunning exhibit, curated by Britta Erickson, includes work from the
1980s and 1990s by artists involved in the recent “Political Pop” art
movement in China, who “[defuse] potent political imagery” by fusing
it with “an American pop sensibility” indebted to Andy Warhol, Roy24

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Lichtenstein and others to critique the “current condition of Chinese culture”79 “A major Political Pop project, for example, was the visual deconstruction of Mao, undertaken by” artists including Yu Youhan, Li Shan,
Liu Dahon, Zhang Hongtu and others. Erickson notes that “this desecration coincided with the Mao Craze, a popular movement that accorded
Mao the kind of fond fervor reserved for Elvis in the West,” helping tobring “Mao down from his pedestal and [expose] the relationship that
had existed between him and the Chinese people as bizarre.” How might
we understand the iconic images of Mao painted on multiple cartons of
Quaker Oats, itself an iconic image of America, by Zhang Hongtu in his
the installation entitled “Long Live Chairman Mao”?80 What does thiswork seem to suggest about the ways in which national icons and commercial images both “marketed” in the service of politics or commerce?
Or how might we understand the blending of prominent consumer brandlogos for Coca-Cola, Canon and Marlboro with iconic socialist realism
propaganda art by Wang Guangyi in his “Great Criticism” series? What
do Wang Guangyi’s implied equation between socialist propaganda andAmerican advertising say to audiences in China and in the U.S.?
American Studies scholars who study consumer culture have tended
to limit their focus to the meanings of consumer goods by those who purchase and use them, most often in the U.S. or Europe. But the striking
series of photographs in On the Edge by Chinese artist Xing Danwen
entitled “disCONNEXION,” reminds us that that the afterlife of those
consumer goods may be worth attending to, as well. Noting that seventy
percent of the world’s electronic trash is exported to China, where whole
villages build their economies around the salvage of wires, cell phones,
and circuit boards mainly from the U.S., Xing photographed massive
piles of electronic waste in Chinese villages in 2002 and 2003. Xing,
who studied photography in the U.S. from 1998 to 2000 in New York
before subsequently moving back to China, captures hauntingly strange
yet familiar images that help focus our attention on the global environmental impact of a consumer culture promoted principally, if not exclusively, by the U.S.
Intriguing questions are raised, as well by the 2002 performance piece“My New York” by the border-crossing Chinese performance artist
Zhang Huan, commissioned by the Whitney Museum of Art in New
York, and recorded in still photographs and video.81 Acknowledging, inthe wake of 9/11, the strength of the people of New York, Zhang attachedstrips of raw beef to his body in a manner that gave him the bulging mus-

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25

cles of a “Mr. Olympic Body Builder” and strode through Manhattan
streets releasing doves along the way, blending this display of strengthwith the Buddhist idea of “accruing grace through the freeing of living
animals.” Zhang explained his performance piece as reﬂecting his belief
that “the United Sates should take on the role of peacemaker, using its
might to promote compassion.”82 But isn’t the jarring rawness of his
meat-covered body striding forcefully through the streets of New Yorkas much a reminder of how exposed and vulnerable this particular colossus of might and power actually is? Exhibits like the Cantor’s On theEdge, as well as the exhibit titled The American Effect at the Whitney in2003 suggest some of the ways in which transnational perspectives on
the part of visual artists can enrich our understanding of the complex,
multivalent responses to American culture and American power aroundthe world.
While transnational visual culture by innovative artists like those represented in On the Edge can spark intriguingly fresh critical perspectives, as I’ve discussed, Shirley Geok-Lin Lim reminds us in a disturbing
and important article in American Studies International in 2002 that
other aspects of the transnational visual culture are taking a frightening
toll on Asian women. Anorexia nervosa and bulimia, serious eating disorders that can be life-threatening, are widely viewed as stemming inlarge part from women’s aspirations to unrealistic body images promoted by the fashion, music and entertainment media and by advertising. These disorders were not unknown in Asia, but until recently weremuch more prevalent in the U.S. Today, Lim tells us, these eating disorders strike “1 in 100 Japanese women, which is also the incidence
reported in the United States. . . . Cases of self-starvation have spread todiverse ethnic and classed women in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Seoulin the past ﬁve years, and are now cropping up in Shanghai, Taipei,
Beijing and countries such as India, Pakistan and the Philippines.”83 Lim
also observes that Asian women, like women in the U.S., also increasingly seek dangerous, unnecessary plastic surgery to conform to thesemass-produced, Caucasian body images. Lim notes that “this phenomenon is not simply a matter of gross Westernization or modernization,”but rather points, as well, to “the globalization of a patriarchal visual culture in which women’s bodies and appearances are homogenized andfetishized as child-like or waif-like, subordinate, vulnerable, and thus
easily regulated.”84 Lim argues that although a range of culture-speciﬁcfactors reinforce body images that are damaging women’s health, the26

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global spread of visual images drawn from American media and advertising play an increasingly deleterious role. Lim writes that “in Asiandescent communities and in Asian countries, women are increasingly
dying in the roles of starved little girls, like their Western counterparts.
Women of Asian descent also have differently inﬂected pressures on
them: to achieve not simply idealized forms of beauty but impossibly
racialized norms that undermine national and communal, as well as personal, identities.”85 As the transnational becomes increasingly central toAmerican Studies, I hope that the understanding the impact of the “globalized commmodiﬁcation of images” of women’s bodies will be, too.
As the transnational becomes increasingly central to American
Studies, we will also welcome research focusing on the cultural workthat American literature does in a range of social and political contexts
around the world. For example, we learn from Leo Oufan Lee that Lin
Shu, who translated Uncle Tom’s Cabin into Chinese in 1901, presented
the book to Chinese readers as a cautionary tale about America’s treatment of people of color, telling his readers that “Recently the treatmentof blacks in America has been carried over to yellow people.”86 And as
the transnational becomes increasingly central to American Studies wewill welcome studies that probe the cultural work of American literature
outside the U.S. for insight into the non-U.S. cultures—as well as into
the American texts themselves. In the just-published book, Mark Twain
and Japan, for example, Tsuyoshi Ishihara’s exploration of what
Japanese writer Kuni Sasaki changed and omitted when he translated
Twain’s Huckleberry Finn into Japanese in 1921 tells us much about
Japanese anti-black prejudice. Ishihara demonstrates that “many significant scenes in the original book that show Jim’s dignity and humanity
were deleted in Sasaki’s translation.”87 Sasaki also misread or mistranslated passages that emphasize the pain Jim feels at being separated fromhis children. Furthermore, Sasaki “tended to disregard Twain’s satiricalattacks on racism and slavery,” altering or deleting “Twain’s most vivid
depictions of racism in the slaveholding South” such as “Pap Finn’s
famous ‘free nigger’ speech.” The omissions and distortions that Ishihara
tracks lend vivid support (as he notes) to Japanese historians Masao
Miyoshi’s claims about the development of anti-black prejudice in Japan—
something the Japanese learned from encounters with Americans.
Ishihara’s examination of how Sasaki, an author known for having “amore liberal and democratic mindset than most of his contemporaries”88

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nonetheless shared his peers’ entrenched racism and transmitted it to thenext generation is illuminating. Ishihara also explores what a 1939 adaptation of Mark Twain’s Prince and the Pauper—a novel by Jiro Osaragi
entitled Hanamaru Kotorimaru—reveals about the rigidity of class hierarchy and patriarchy in Imperial Japan; in another chapter he examines
what the changes and cuts made by Japanese translators of Tom Sawyerand Huck Finn during the American occupation after World War II show
about postwar moral anxieties and confusion.89
If Mark Twain provided the Japanese not only with a way to explore
issues of hierarchy, freedom, tradition, and morality in their own society, Walt Whitman turns out to have acted as an intermediary who helped
reattach a noted Chinese writer to his own Taoist roots, and also played
a role in shaping Chinese literary modernism.90 Biographies of famousﬁgures in American history can do “cultural work” in a transnational
context as well, as we learn from Scott Wong’s intriguing discussion of
the biography of George Washington in China. Scott Wong’s deft understanding of both Chinese and U.S. sources allows him to generate surprising insights into how Washington’s life story was pressed into theservice of a range of political agendas in China from the 1850s throughthe end of the 19th century.91
Hitomi Nabae asks equally fascinating questions in her survey of thereception and translation of Henry James in Japan. Among other insights,
she observes that the roots of some aspects of the Japanese language
today may lie in nineteenth-century efforts to translate writers like
James. James’ ﬁrst translator, Nabae notes, professor and literary critic
Tenjin (Shin) Katagami published his translation of James’ 1896 story,“The Way it Came” in 1909 in Waseda Bungaku. Nabae writes that
“Translating pronouns into Japanese was problematic, because they did
not originally exist in Japanese. In fact, the pronouns we use now inJapanese were the products of translation in the nineteenth century. For
example, in ‘The Way It Came,’ Katagami translated ‘she’ as ‘thatwoman,’ ‘that person’ or ‘that one’ according to the context and depending on the gender of the speaker. He was apparently searching fora way to create a concept of a woman as a speaking and acting subject.”Translating James helped introduce the idea of “a woman as a speaking
and acting subject” into Japanese. Nabae uses the history of Japanesetranslations of James as a lens through which to examine changing perspectives on interpretation, pedagogy, and language in Japan, as well as

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Japanese literary scholars’ ideas about the West. In other words, sheshows us how much we can learn about 20th century Japan by understanding how Japanese writers, teachers, and critics assimilated James.92
We need to understand the cultural work that forms originating in the
U.S. do in cultures outside the U.S., studying their reception and reconﬁguration in contexts informed by a deep understanding of the countries
where that cultural work is taking place. One interesting model for thiskind of work is Aviad Raz’s study of the ways in which the Japanese“Japanized” Disneyland in his book Riding the Black Ship.93 (Anotherwould be a book that I long to read, but can’t, until it is translated into
English—and that is Masako Notoji’s best-selling study of Tokyo’s
Disneyland.)94 Priya Joshi’s recent prize-winning book on the impactthat 19th century British books exported to India had on 20th century
Indian writing suggests the value of pursuing analogous work regarding
the impact of American literature on a range of cultures in which it wasavailable.95 Although there has been no systematic study of the inﬂuenceof American literature on Indian writers comparable to Joshi’s work on
the inﬂuence of British writers, there is at least one article on the topic
by Kaiser Haq, which looks at the inﬂuence of American writing on“Bengali and Indo-Anglian Poetry.”96 The cultural work done by U.S.
popular culture abroad—how American television, ﬁlm, the internet,
rock, and popular music help societies outside the U.S. negotiate aspectsof their own cultures—is a topic that will increasingly interest us, as well.
Cultural imperialism turns out to be too simple a model to understandhow culture works, as much of the scholarship I cite here conveys.97
As the transnational becomes increasingly central to American Studies, we will value contemporary scholarship that probes the vectors of
tourism and the commodiﬁcation of culture and heritage from multiple
vantage points, examining the matrix of factors that produce any given
interaction and that shape its impact. In her new book Longfellow’s
Tatoos: Tourism, Collecting and Japan, for example, Christine Guthprobes visual and material culture to explore how American travelers toJapan in the 1860s and 70s appropriated Japanese products to fashion
themselves as Americans, and offers new perspectives on American andJapanese constructions of masculinity.98 A good example of transnational American Studies focused on late 20th century travel and tourism
is Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle by
Ryan Bishop and Lillian Robinson,99 which examines the “cultural, historical, material, and textual roles the U.S. played in the establishment

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of the international sex tourism industry in Thailand, an industry central
to that country’s ‘economic miracle.’ ”100 Yet another good example—
this time focusing on Asian travelers to the U.S. rather than U.S. travelers
to Asia, is a recent article by Yujin Yaguchi and Mari Yoshihara on
Japanese tourist discourse on Hawai‘i.101
As the transnational becomes more central to American Studies,scholars are increasingly exploring the consumption of culture-speciﬁc
cuisines in global contexts, as well, looking at the culinary sphere as aterrain on which a range of values are negotiated.102 For example,
Sangmee Bak explores the construction of Korean identity by studying
responses to McDonald’s in Seoul,103 while Rüdiger Kunow examines
the Indian Diaspora in the U.S. by studying the ways in which food functions in a range of contemporary texts as a “janus-faced signiﬁer, pointing to the ‘here’ of diasporic life worlds as at the same time as it gestures
to the ‘there’ of a home” to which one really cannot return.104 Meanwhile,
Su-ching Huang explores “gastronomic mobility and model minority
discourse in David Wong Louie’s Novel The Barbarians Are Coming.”105 And Wilfried Raussert, Rachel Lee and others have looked at theways in which characters in Mei Ng’s novel Eating Chinese Food Naked
work through issues of personal identity through their consumption offood. As Raussert put it, the main character’s “experiments with cooking
as well as her multicultural eating experiences encompassing Chinese,
Chinese-American, Jewish, Italian and fast food go hand in hand withher various heterosexual and homosexual adventures. . . .” reﬂecting thechallenges of embracing “a desire for bodily pleasures on the one handand a hunger for identiﬁcation on the other” in her efforts to determine
who she really is.106
While most Americanists in he U.S. today reject celebratory narrativesof American exceptionalism and nationalism, viewing earlier proponentsof them as blinkered and benighted, many have a curious complacency
about something that may strike future generations as equally benighted:
an intellectual provincialism that is just as problematical. If the old
exceptionalist, nationalist scholarship privileged the U.S. as a uniquerepository of progress and wisdom, many today privilege the work of
U.S.-based scholars in an analogous way. As John Carlos Rowe has
noted, “Even when we are dealing with international phenomena, suchas imperialism, economic trade, and immigration and diaspora, we continue to rely on examples and authors from within the continental UnitedStates.”107 The rich array of border-crossing, transnational scholarship

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that I’ve cited here should convey the pitfall of the assumption that U.S.based scholars are responsible for the only American Studies scholarship that matters, and that and that whatever American academics do notknow can’t possibly be worth knowing. One of my favorite Yiddish
proverbs is: “Der vor(e)m in khreyn denkt az s’iz zis.”108 “The worm inhorseradish thinks [his life] is sweet.” How does he know? How can
U.S.-based scholars have any perspective on their subject of study if theytalk only to themselves? I do not want to privilege or essentialize location
as a key determinant of the kind or quality of scholarship a person is
likely to produce. What I do want to do, however is interrogate the privileged position that U.S.-based scholars and publications enjoy in theﬁeld of American Studies.
For example, there are many useful American Studies anthologies
published outside the U.S. For example, The United States in Times of
War and Peace, edited by Zhou Baodi and published in Beijing 2005
includes such interesting articles as “A Comparison of G.W. Bush’s
Inaugural Speeches, 2001 and 2005” by Zhou Zhen, “From Korean War
to Iraq War: Change of American Attitude Toward Dover Test” by Cai
Chuihong, and “Multilingualism or Unilingualism?—A Historical Review of the National Language Policies in the United States” by Wang
Shijing.109 Rediscovering America edited by Kousar J. Azam and published in 2001 in New Delhi includes a stimulating discussion of theinternationalization of American Studies from an Indian perspective by
Azam, as well as such interesting contributions as Prafulla Kar’s oveview of American Studies in India, R.S. Sharma’s discussion of the
global impact of the World’s Parliament of Religions at the World
Columbian Exposition, Sukhbir Singh’s look at the inﬂuence ofHinduism on several post-modern American novelists, Isaac Siqueira’s
reading of the rituals of the Super Bowl, and Rui Kohiyama’s study ofAmerican Christian women’s campaign to establish women’s collegesin China, India and Japan in the 1910s and 1920s.110 Another interesting
book, Crossed Memories: Perspectives on 9/11 and American Power,edited by Laura Hein and Daizaburo Yui published in Tokyo 2003,
includes Yusheng Yang’s examination of Mao Tse-tung’s views of theUnited States and Yujin Yaguchi’s article on Japanese responses to the
Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.111
There are also a number of American Studies journals published outside the U.S. of which U.S.-based Americanists need to be more aware.
One of the most important publications on Mark Twain this year is the

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

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inaugural issue of a new Japanese journal called Mark Twain Studiesedited by Takayuki Tatsumi, that came out in October. In a fascinating
article in the journal entitled “ ‘Was Huck Burak(k)u?’ Reading andTeaching Twain in Asian Paciﬁc World Literature,” Mary Knightonprobes how Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe recasts Twain’s novel Huck
Finn in his novella “Prize Stock” in ways that engage Japan’s treatmentof the “burakumin,” a formerly discriminated-against and segregatedoutcast class.112 The journal also includes Tatsumi’s discussion of therole that Twain’s novel Connecticut Yankee plays in an important
Japanese nonﬁction novel about the Vietnam War.113 One of the mostlucid and helpful discussions of the evolution of Asian American ﬁction
was an article that appeared in 2002 in the journal of the Japanese Association for American Studies, the Japanese Journal of American
Studies in 2002: Fukuko Kobayashi article on “Producing Asian
American Spaces.”114 (An extensive but incomplete listing of international American Studies journals—including journals from Bangladesh,
China, India, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan—with web links to many, appears on the web site of American Quarterly, the journal of the American
Studies Association as well as the “International Initiative” web page of
the ASA.115 The ASA is planning to develop these links in the future,making it easier for Americanists around the world to access the broad
range of journals published in the ﬁeld, including the increasing numberof relevant journals in Asia.)
Conversation and collaboration across borders are key dimensions ofmaking American Studies more transnational. We can do much to improve and build on the array of existing institutional structures—from
Fulbright grants to other forms of student-faculty exchanges to links
through distance learning technology to ASA International Partnership
Grants and the ASA’s International Initiative. A government-supported
entity like the Fulbright Program continues to be a potentially excellent
resource for U.S. and international scholars. An increased awareness of
the impressive array of important work being done in American Studies
outside the U.S. should make U.S.-based scholars traveling abroad on
Fulbrights welcome the chance to listen and learn rather than pontiﬁcate
as “expert witnesses” on the U.S. just because we happen to live there;
foreign hosts and students may know more on speciﬁc topics than we
do. International scholars who have come to the U.S. on Fulbrights areproducing some of the most interesting books coming out of U.S. University presses—like Etsuko Taketani’s 2003 book U.S. Women Writers

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and the Discourses of Colonialism, 1825–1861 or Tsuyoshi Ishihara’s
2005 book Mark Twain in Japan.116 Other forms of student-faculty
exchanges can also do much to foster transnational collaboration. For
example, Jay Mechling of the University of California at Davis teaches
a freshman seminar on “Violence and Culture in the U.S. and Japan”
simultaneously at UC-Davis and Hosei University in Tokyo, using
instructional technology for distance learning; the readings and thestudents come from both Japan and the U.S., and students in both countries share their thoughts through electronic discussion postings.117 We
can also try simpler ventures linking our classrooms across the Paciﬁc.
Tsuyoshi Ishihara and I have our students read the same story or novel
the same week, and email each other questions and responses. The ASAInternational Partnership grants are also designed to foster collaborationand communication between American Studies programs in the U.S. andoutside the U.S.118 (Partnership grants have been approved linking U.S.
programs with programs in Austria, China, Israel, the Republic ofGeorgia, Russia, Spain and the West Bank—but not with any programsin Asia yet, outside of China. A new round of ASA international partnership grants will be awarded this year, and I hope some will link U.S.
programs with institutions in other parts of Asia.)119
All of these efforts will be unnecessarily limited, however, unless wealso manage to change the culture of the profession. U.S.-based scholars have to engage with scholarship published outside the U.S. and weneed to require our students to do the same. We also need to seek opportunities to interact with scholars outside the U.S. in person. Exchanges
at conferences can be incubators for collaborative research projects, publications and courses. We cannot predict which conversations, correspondence, or encounters will plant seeds that will bear fruit some day.
What we can do is remain open to what Annette Kolodny calls “theserendipity of scholarship” as we struggle to understand the transnationalcrossroads of cultures that confront us in American Studies.120 U.S.based Americanists should eschew imperial ambitions in our scholarshipas readily as we condemn them in U.S. politics; reluctant to impose ourown perspectives on others who may not share them, we should learn tolisten more and talk less. U.S.-based American Studies scholars need tomake an effort to connect with scholars outside the U.S. through all ofthese channels—in print and in person.
I have a personal reason for wanting to see that happen. It has to dowith the debt I owe to scholars and writers outside the U.S. who have

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

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been central to my own work. A conversation with University of Tokyo
professor Masako Notoji in 1994 at an international committee reception of the ASA totally derailed my research agenda in enormously fruitful ways. Notoji, who was researching American theme parks andhistoric sites, had been regaling me with stories of the half-dozen historic sites in the United States she’d just visited, one of which was
Hannibal, Missouri. I confessed I had never been there. She was incredulous. “You haven’t been to Hannibal? And you work on Mark Twain?”“But you must go,” she scolded. “It’s that simple: you must go.” I decided she was right. I went. I knew that Hannibal’s economy was built on
Mark Twain tourism. But not until I followed Notoji’s advice and went
there for myself did I realize how shamefully the town was whitewashing both America’s past and ignoring what mattered most about MarkTwain. My book Lighting Out for the Territory was the result. Key partsof that book came directly out of conversations I had with Japanese
Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe (whose discussion of my book in a column in Asahi Shimbun gratiﬁed me enormously). The book was also
shaped by correspondence with scholars in China and India, as well asother scholars in Japan.121 Asian scholars continue to have a major impact
on my research agenda. It was when I gave the keynote talk at a conference organized by Zhou Baodi of Yunnan University in Kunming, China
in June 2005 that I was ﬁrst struck by the importance of increasing international awareness of Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer.” And it was when
I went to Kyoto to deliver the keynote talk at the Japanese Associationof American Studies conference later that week that I was able to dosomething to make that happen: a conversation with Takayuki Tatsumi
of Keio University at a JAAS reception led to a fruitful collaborative project that we hope will involve many scholars from Asia, the U.S., andother parts of the world.122 Visits I made to conferences and universities
in Kyoto and Tokyo in 1999, in Seoul and Shanghai in 2004 and in
Kunming, Kyoto, Tokyo, Seoul and Taipei in 2005, and visits from Asianscholars to ASA meetings in the U.S. set in motion correspondence andconversations that have enriched my understandings of Asian Crossroads in American Studies in enormously fruitful ways. This essay—
indeed, much of my insight into the importance of transnational
American Studies today—comes from those interactions.123
Reading Thoreau helped inspire Gandhi to develop his own brand ofcivil disobedience, which crossed the Paciﬁc to inspire the Civil Rights
Movement; the idea of dissent through civil disobedience as particularly

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American resurfaced in Asia when Tiananmen square protesters used the
Statue of Liberty as a symbol. The story of this apparently “American”
phenomena—civil disobedience—is a story of transnational ﬂow, as is
the story of America itself. The U.S. is and has always been a transnational crossroads of cultures. And that crossroads of cultures that we referto as “American culture” has itself generated a host of other crossroadsof cultures as it has crossed borders between the U.S. and Asia. I wrote
this essay sitting in my living room, in a Japanese-style house on the
Stanford campus, designed in the 1950s by an architect who drew his
inspiration from, among others, Frank Lloyd Wright, who drew his inspiration, in part, from a Japanese exhibit at the World Columbian Exposition, as well as subsequent trips to Japan.124 I hope that the transnational
turn in American Studies will help us continue to explore some of the
U.S. -Asian crossroads I’ve discussed here in all their richness and complexity.
NOTES
This paper was given at the Annual Meeting of the Japanese Association for American
Studies, Kyoto University, 4 June 2005.
1
For more on the Boston Tea Party, go to http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/
revolution/teaparty.htm, accessed 6 May 2005. See also http://www.pbs.org/ktca/liberty/chronicle_boston1774.html. Stephen Sumida reminded us that the Tea Party’s tea
came from Asia in his ASA Presidential Address, “Where in the World Is American
Studies? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, Houston, Texas,
November 15, 2002,” American Quarterly 55:3 (September 2003), 333.
2
“Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott were especially attracted to Oriental philosophy andreligion, reading in translations available to them and copying favorite passages (fromConfucius, Laws of Menu, Hinduism, Buddhism, and more) into their personal notebooks and from there into the Dial, their prose and poetry [see Emerson’s Hamatreya,
Saadi, and Brahma, for example.] Tracking these inﬂuences can be difﬁcult, as David
Ch’en’s essay on Thoreau and Taoism shows. See also “East Meets West: Oriental Seeds
in Occidental Soil,” by Swami B. G. Narasingha and Satyaraja dasa (Steven Rosen),
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/roots/rootsintro.html, accessed 17 November 2005. See also http://www.gosai.com/chaitanya/saranagati/html/nmj_articles/
east_west/, accessed 17 November 2005.
3
For an image of “one of the set of ten color prints [by Cassatt] inspired by the 1890
Paris exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints,” see “From the Artist’s Studio: Unknown
Prints and Drawings by Mary Cassatt,” November 10-December 29, 2000, Mark Rosen
Fine Art, Ltd., http://www.marcrosenﬁneart.com/pages/cassattpages/cassattexhcat.html,
accessed 6 May 2005. Although Japanese wooblock prints may have been the form ofJapanese art that had the greatest inﬂuence on Cassatt, she is known to have collected
other Japanese art, as well. On exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for example,
is “Autumn Flowers,” by Kitagawa Sosetsu, which came from Cassatt’s personal collection. This mid-seventeenth-century ink-and-colors on paper painting mounted on a

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six-fold screen depicted (according to the descriptive card in the display case), “ivy, bush
clover, mallow, cockscomb, and grasses,” and the artist to whom it was attributed was“a disciple of Tawaraya Sosetsu, who was either a younger brother, son, or disciple ofthe famed early seventeenth-century Rimpaschool painter Tawaraya Sosatsu.” I viewed
this object at the museum on October 29, 2005.
Other nineteenth-century American painters—such as James McNeill Whistler—were
also heavily inﬂuenced Japanese art, speciﬁcally the work of Japanese artist Torii
Kiyonaga (See Lionel Lambourne, Japonisme: Cultural Crossings Between Japan andthe West, New York and London: Phaidon, 2005). Japanese inﬂuences on nineteenthcentury American art also emerged clearly from the exhibit “Windows Facing East: The
Japanese Inﬂuence on European and American Prints” at the Palace of the Legion of
Honor in San Francisco, 29 January–30 April 2005. See also Susan G. Larkin, “Japanismin the Cos Cob Art Colony—the Inﬂuence of Japan at the Cos Cob, Connecticut Art
Colony, 1890–1920,” Magazine Antiques, March 2001, http://www.ﬁndarticles.com/p/
articles/mi_m1026/is_3_159/ai_71578616, accessed 16 October 2005.
4
See Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Mark Twain” chapter in From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
5
Gary Okihiro, Common Ground: Reimagining American History (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 17.
6“‘Miya sama, miya sama / On n’m-ma no mayé ni / Pira-Pira suru no wa / Nan gia
na / Toko tonyaré tonyaré na?’—This is a legitimate Japanese song and was of fairly
recent composition when Gilbert appropriated it for The Mikado. A war song of theJapanese Imperial Army, it was sung by the loyalist troops who put down a rebellion in
1877. Translations vary.” http://members.aol.com/gsvloc/mik_glo1.htm, accessed 6
May 2005.
7
Hitomi Nabae’s research, discussed below, addresses the ways in which translationsof American authors into Japanese reshaped Japanese language in the nineteenth century. The inﬂuence of Walt Whitman on Chinese poets is also discussed below. John
Listopad, curator of Asian Art at Stanford University, has noted that although Protestantmissionaries made few converts in 19th century Thailand, they did manage to spark anumber of transformations in Thai Buddhism (personal communication, spring 2004).
8David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 389.
9
Palumbo-Liu imaginatively evokes this “in process” quality in the very title of hisbook, Asian/American, by substituting a solidus for the hyphen that more commonly
connects these two terms in print. He writes, “as it at once implies both exclusion andinclusion, ‘Asian/American’ marks both the distinction installed between ‘Asian’ and‘American’ and a dynamic unsettled, and inclusive movement.” (Palumbo-Liu, Asian/
American, 1.) By “Asian crossroads” I seek to evoke a similarly “dynamic, unsettled,
and inclusive movement,” a sense of openness and ﬂow. Palumbo-Liu expands on theseideas in “Modeling the Nation: The Asian/American Split” in Orientations: Mapping
Studies in the Asian Diaspora, edited by Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2001), 213–227. Chuh and Shimakawa address a similar idea of
movement, “the literal circulation of peoples and cultures, and on the ﬁgurative meanings of those movements.” Chuh and Shimakawa, eds., Orientations, 7.
10
Makoto Nagawara, “ ‘A True Story’ and Its Manuscript: Mark Twain’s Image of theAmerican Black,” Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic Literary Studies
xxix:xxx (Tokyo, 1989), l43–156.
11
Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights andStates’ Rights (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), won the 2002 Richard
A. McLemore Book Prize of the Mississippi Historical Society.

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Wang Jianping, “Literature’s War with History: Problematizing Historical Representation in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks,” in Zhou Baodi, ed., The United States in Timesof War and Peace (Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2005);
Liang-ya Liou, Race, Gender, and Representation: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved (Taipei: Bookman, 2000).
13
In particular, this essay builds on work by ASA Past Presidents including Michael
Cowan, Alice Kessler-Harris, Linda Kerber, Cathy Davidson, Paul Lauter, Elaine Tyler
May, Mary Helen Washington, Cecilia Tichi, Jan Radway, Mary Kelley, Michael Frisch,George Sanchez, Stephen Sumida and Amy Kaplan, and on work by ASA members John
Carlos Rowe, George Lipsitz, Emory Elliott, Jane Desmond, Virginia Dominguez, Eric
Sandeen, Guenter Lenz, Heinz Ickstadt, Henry Yu, Kousar Azam, John Muthyala, DorisFriedensohn, Susan Gillman, Kirsten Silva Greusz, Rob Wilson, Bernard Mergen,
Richard Horwitz, and Robert Morse Crunden. Presidential addresses by each of these
ASA Presidents appeared annually in the spring or summer issue of American Quarterly.
See also John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). See especially Barbara Brinson Curiel, David Kazanjian,
Katherine Kinney, Steven Mailloux, Jay Mechling, John Carlos Rowe, George Sanchez,
Shelley Streeby, and Henry Yu, “Introduction,” 1–21 and Rowe, “Postnationalism,
Globalism, and the New American Studies,” 23–37, as well as the other useful essays
in this volume; Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002); George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Emory Elliott, “The International Activities of
the ASA,” American Studies Newsletter 71:4 (June 1994); Jane C. Desmond and Virginia
R. Dominguez, “Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism,” American
Quarterly 48 (September 1996): 475–90; Michael Cowan and Eric Sandeen, “The Internationalization of American Studies,” American Studies Newsletter 71:4 (June 1994);
Guenter Lenz, “Internationalizing American Studies: Predecessors, Paradigms, andCultural Critique—A View from Germany,” in Rob Kroes, ed., Predecessors: Intellectual Lineages in American Studies (Amsterdam: VU Press, 1999), 236–255; Lenz, “Toward a Dialogics of International American Culture Studies: Transnationality, Border
Discourses, and Public Culture(s),” in Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The
Futures of American Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 461–485; Heinz
Ickstadt, “American Studies in an Age of Globalization,” American Quarterly 54:4
(December 2002): 543–562; Ickstadt, “Americanism, Anti-Americanism, and American
Studies” (unpublished paper delivered in Toronto, March 2004); Robert A. Gross, “TheTransnational Turn: Rediscovering American Studies in a Wider World,” Journal of
American Studies [U.K.] 34:3 (December 2000): 373–393; Henry Yu, “Los Angeles andAmerican Studies in a Paciﬁc World of Migrations” American Quarterly 56:3 (September 2004): 531–543; Rodica Mihaila, “Cultural Translation and the Discourse of
Transnationalism in American Studies,” in Rodica Mihaila and Irina Grigorescu Pana,
eds. Transatlantic Connections: Essays in Cultural Relocation (Bucharest: Editura Integral, 2000); Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic
Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Giles, “Virtual Americas: The Internationalization of American Studies and the Ideology of Exchange” American Quarterly
50:3 (1998): 523–547; Kousar J. Azam, “Introduction,” and “Internationalization ofAmerican Studies and the Emerging Paradigms: An Indian Perspective,” in Kousar
Azam, ed., Rediscovering America: American Studies in the New Century (New Delhi:South Asian Publishers, 2001; paperback, Colorado Springs: International Academic
Publishers/South Asian Publishers, 2002), 1–13; John Muthyala, “‘America’ in Transit:
The Heresies of American Studies Abroad,” Comparative American Studies 1(2003):

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

37

395–420; Doris Friedensohn, “Towards a Post-Imperial, Transnational American Studies: Notes of a Frequent Flier,” American Studies 38:2 (1997). Reprinted in American
Studies International 36:1 (1998): 26–45; Susan Gillman, Kirsten Silva Greusz, and Rob
Wilson, eds., Worlding American Studies. [special issue] Comparative American Studies
2:3 (September 2004) (especially Gillman, Greusz and Wilson, “Worlding American
Studies,” 259–270; George Lipsitz, “Abolition Democracy and Global Justice,”
271–286; Arif Dirlik, “American Studies in the Time of Empire,” 287–302; and Robert
McKee Irwin “¿Qué Hacen Los Nuevos Americanistas?: Collaborative Strategies for a
Postnationalist American Studies,” 303–32; Bernard Mergen, “Can American Studies
be Globalized?” American Studies 41 (Summer-Fall 2000): 303–20; Richard P. Horwitz,ed., Exporting America: Essays on American Studies Abroad (New York: Garland,1993); Robert Morse Crunden, ed., The Trafﬁc of Ideas between India And America(New Delhi: Chanakya Pulications, 1985); Robert M. Crunden, American Salons:
Encounters With European Modernism, 1885–1917 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993). See also a relevant review essay by Priscilla Wald, “Mineﬁelds and Meeting Grounds: Transnational Analyses and American Studies,” American Literary
History 10:1 (Spring 1998): 199–218.
Paul Lauter, “A Call for (at Least a Little) American Studies Chauvinism.” ASA Newsletter, June 1996, http://www.georgetown.edu/crossroads/AmericanStudiesAssn/newsletter/archive/articles/lauter4.html, accessed 30 October 2004. There are earlier
forebears as well for addressing the transnational dimensions of American culture. For
an overview of some ﬁgures who were ahead of the curve, see Shelley Fisher Fishkin,“American Studies in the 21st Century: A Usable Past,” Journal of British and American
Studies [Korea] 10 (30 June 2004): 31–55.
14
Carolyn Porter, “What We Know that We Don’t Know: Remapping American
Literary Studies,” American Literary History 6 (1994): 470.
15
See José David Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
16
Transnational questions inform crossroads involving other parts of the world, aswell, and I have addressed some of these other crossroads in my Presidential Address
to the American Studies Association. See Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Crossroads ofCultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies—Presidential Address to theAmerican Studies Association, November 12, 2004,” American Quarterly, 57:1 (March
2005): 17–57.
17
Henry Yu, “Los Angeles and American Studies in a Paciﬁc World of Migrations,”
American Quarterly, Special Issue, 56:3 (September 2004): 531–543. Also extremely
useful for understanding the “Paciﬁc world of migrations” in shaping American culture
is Catherine Ceniza Choy’s book Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino
American History, which tackles transnational reinscriptions of both racism and sexismin the context of the global labor migrations. Catherine Ceniza Choy Empire of Care:
Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History [American Encounters/Global
Interactions series] (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
18
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern
America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
19
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race & Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Leiwi Li, Imagining the Nation:
Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998); Jinqi Ling, Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American
Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging

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Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (NewYork: New York University Press, 2004); and Patricia Chu, Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America (Durham: Duke University Press,
2000). Okihiro noted the importance of the efforts of Asians and other minorities to“transform, and not simply reform, American society and its structures.” Okihiro has inmind “the challenges posed by Asians to a central tenet of American democracy—equality under the law” but also “how Asians helped to redeﬁne the meaning of American
identity, to expand it beyond the narrower idea of only white and black, and to move it
beyond the conﬁnes of the American state and the prescribed behaviors of loyalty andpatriotism.” Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History
and Culture (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1994), 155.
20
Kun Jong Lee, “The African-American Presence in Younghill Kang’s East Goes
West,” CLA Journal (2002); Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “The Yellow and the Black: The
African-American Presence in Sinophone Chinese American Literature,” Chung Wai
Literary Monthly, 34:4 (September 2005). Yukiko Koshiro, “Beyond an Alliance ofColor: The African American Impact on Modern Japan,” positions: east asia cultures
critique, 11:1 (Spring 2003): 183–215. Other articles in this special issue of positions,devoted to “The Afro-Asian Century,” and guest-edited by Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil
Pal Singh, explore related topics in useful ways, as well.
21
Henry Yu, “Los Angeles,” 531.
22
Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism andMigration Between the U.S. and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000).
23
Xiao-huang Yin, “Changes and Continuity in Chinese American Philanthropy to
China: A Case Study of Chinese American Transnationalism,” American Studies, 45:2
(Summer 2004): 57–91; Xiao-huang Yin and Peter Koehn, “Chinese American Transnationalism and U.S.–China Relations: Presence and Promise for the Trans-Paciﬁc
Century,” in The Expanding Roles of Chinese Americans in U.S.-China Relations:
Transnational Networks and Trans-Paciﬁc Interactions, ed. Peter Koehn and Xiaohuang Yin (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002).
24
The most important book addressing this body of work is Jim Zwick, Mark Twain’s
Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine American War (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1992).
25
Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The PhilippineAmerican War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999 (New York: NewYork University Press, 2002).
26
Gordon H. Chang, “Whose ‘Barbarism?’ Whose ‘Treachery’? Race and Civilizationin the Unknown United States-Korea War of 1871,” Journal of American History, 89:4
(March 2003): 1331–32
27
Gordon H. Chang, “Whose ‘Barbarism?’ Whose ‘Treachery’? Race and Civilizationin the Unknown United States-Korea War of 1871,” 1331–32.
28
Lisa Lowe, “Work, Immigration, and Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics,”
in The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 363–364.
29
Lowe, “Work, Immigration, and Gender,” 364.
30
Laura Hyun- Yi Kang, “Si(gh)ting Asian/American women as Transnational Labor,” positions: east asia cultural critique 5:2 (fall 1997): 403–37; Laura Ho, Catherine
Powell, and Leti Volpp. “(Dis)assembling Rights of Women Workers Along the Global
Assembly Line: Human Rights and the Garment Industry,” in Feminist Legal Theory:
An Anti-Essentialist Reader, eds. Nancy E. Dowd and Michelle S. Jacobs (New York:ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES39

New York University Press, 2003), 292–310. See also No Sweat: Fashion, Free Trade,and the Rights of Garment Workers, ed. Andrew Ross (London: Verso, 1997).
31Mark Twain’s “Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again,” was serialized in Galaxy in
October 1870, November 1870, and January 1871. Twain begins each of the three serializations with the following: “NOTE.—No experience is set down in the following letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not needed to give variety to the history of a
Chinaman’s sojourn in America. Plain fact is amply sufﬁcient.” The series of letters are
reprinted in Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1852–1890,
ed. Louis J. Budd (New York: Library of America, 1992), and are available online at
http://www.twainquotes.com/Galaxy/gindex.html. Goldsmith himself took the device
from Persian Letters (1721) by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu,
which inspired other works in this vein as well.
32
For an overview of Chinese-language materials on the Chinese in America that areavailable, see Mark Him Lai, A History Reclaimed: An Annotated Bibliography ofChinese Language Materials on the Chinese of America (Los Angeles: UCLA Asian
American Studies Center, 1986).
33
Louis Chu’s 1961 Eat a Bowl of Tea is widely cited as the ﬁrst Chinese-American
novel set in Chinese America.
34
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “Chinese American Literature,” in An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. King-Kok Cheung (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 43–44.
35
Kuxuesheng is included in Fanmei huagong jinyue wenxue ji [A collection of literature against the American exclusion of Chinese laborers] compiled by Aying (Beijing:
Zhonghua shuju, 1960), cited in Wong, “Chinese American Literature,” 55.
36
Referring to yet another body of literature that has not made its way into American
Studies, Chih-ming Wang suggests that “Re-examining the popular genre known as liuxuesheng wenxue (literature of the overseas students) in the 1960s and 1970s would help
us map out a different set of Asian/American relations,” and would be a fruitful subject
for critical inquiry. Wang explores some of the issues this body of literature raises in“Feeling Asian America in Taiwan.” (Wang, “Feeling Asian America in Taiwan,” 4).
Discussions of this literature in Chinese that Wang cites include David Der-wei Wang,
Xiaoshuo Zhongguo: wanqing dao dangdai de zhongwen xiaoshuo (Taipei: Maitian,1993), and Dai Jinghua, Jingcheng Dixingtu: Dangdai wenhua xuxie yu yanjiu (Taipei:
Lianhe wenxue, 1999). Some of these texts are also discussed in the monograph cited
below by Xiao-huang Yin.
37
Xiao-huang Yin, Chinese American Literature since the 1850s (Urbana-Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2000).
38
Several historians have recently made a similarly compelling case for the importance of using Chinese-language sources in historical research. See Yong Chen, “In Their
Own Words: The Signiﬁcance of Chinese-language Sources for Studying Chinese
American History,” Journal of Asian American Studies 5:3 (2002): 243–268. See also
Him Mark Lai, “Musings of a Chinese American Historian,” Amerasia Journal 26:1
(2000): 2–30.
39
Mark Him Lai, Genny Lim and Judy Yung, eds., Island: Poetry and History ofChinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1991).
40
March Shell and Werner Sollers, eds., Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations [a Longfellow InstituteBook] (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Werner Sollors, ed., Multilingual
America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity and the Languages of American Literature [a40SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN

Longfellow Institute Book] (New York: New York University Press, 1998). More information on the Longfellow Institute’s efforts to further the availability of literature in
Languages Of What Is Now the United States (LOWINUS) and scholarship on that literature is available at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~lowinus/, accessed 30 September
2005. Although scholars are embracing and studying American literature in languages
other than English, public libraries that endeavor to serve modern America’s multingual
population in its collections sometimes ﬁnd themselves under attack by political“English only” advocates. See Associated Press, “Bilingual Material in Libraries Draws
Some Criticism,” New York Times, 5 September 2005. This article notes that the website of the Queens Library in New York City is “offered in English, Spanish, Chinese,
French, Russian and Korean” and that there is a “large Chinese-language collection at
the San Francisco Public Library.” http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/national/
05library.html?ex=1128398400&en=197305be0f6df6d6&ei=5070, accessed 2 October 2005.
41
Kyuick Cho, ed., Haebangjeon jaemihanin iminmoonhak [Korean American Immigrant Literature before 1945], 6 vols (Seoul: Wolin, 1999). Lee also showed me a novel
published in Korea by Korean-American novelist Kyung Sook Lee that has similarly
not been translated entitled Sa-baek-chil-sip-o-bun Do-ro-wi-eh-suh (a title that Kun
Jong Lee translates as On Highway #475). Some more recent Korean-American writingin Korean has found its way to English-speaking readers in Surfacing Sadness: A Centennial of Korean-American Literature 1903–2003, eds. Yearn Hong Choi and Haeng
Ja Kim (Paramus, N.J.: Homa & Sekey Books, 2003).
42
Pin-chia Feng. “Re-Mapping Asian American Literature: The Case of Fu Sang.”
American Studies International 38:1 (2000): 61–70.
43
John Sederstrom, “Columia grad Yan Geling wins awards, acclaim for ﬁction,”
Columbia Chronicle Online, http://www.ccchronicle.com/back/1999_spring/99mar15/
news2.html, accessed 30 September 2005. “Yan Geling—Impact of Life Breakthroughs,” (CCTV-Com. 05–22–05 12:58), CCTV-English Channel Up Close, http://
english.cctv.com/program/UpClose/20050522/100328.shtml, accessed 30 September
2005; “Annie Wang’s Interview with Ms. Yan Geling,” http://www.chineseculture.net/
yangeling.html, accessed 30 September 2005.
44
Yan Geling, The Lost Daughter of Happiness, translated by Cathy Silber (New York:
Hyperion East, 2001).
45
Feng, “Re-Mapping,” 61.
46
Te-hsing Shan, “Redeﬁning Chinese Amerian Literature from a LOWINUS Perspective: Two Recent Examples,” in Sollors, ed., Multilingual America, 112–123.
47
Feng writes “Fu Sang’s power of transformation is perhaps most clearly represented
by the two illustrations on the book jacket. The front cover portrays the back of a naked
woman stranded on a bare rock, with a sampan sailing away from her. This picture visualizes Fu Sang’s sense of extreme isolation and vulnerability after her involuntary voyage across the Paciﬁc. On the back, however, we see a smiling woman dressed in a formal
Chinese outﬁt of the late nineteenth century. Instead of the bare rock, this woman isstanding on an open shell, posing as Botticelli’s Venus. Between these two cover drawings, the illustrator has skillfully translated for us what has happened inside the text withvisual language; we see how Fu Sang has metamorphosed from a slave woman into agoddess of love. It is also interesting that the illustrator chooses to highlight Fu Sang’stransformation in terms of spatial location. This brings us to the issue of space in thenovel. Throughout the text, Fu Sang is exoticized not only in visual codes but also in
spatial terms and her othernss is always demarcated bby spatial and geographic references. Even in the Chinese community she is an ‘other’ because she comes from an

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

41

inland province instead of the oceanic Canton, where most of the early immigrants camefrom. Physically, Fu Sang has always been locked inside Chintaown, a miniature replication of the ‘mysterious Orient’ that is full of evil and corruption in the land of freedom. Her alien features, including her bound feet, personify the ‘inscrutability’ of the
Orient, at least to Chris: ‘Every move of this oriental woman surprised him. She is thedemonic Orient in his mind’ (101). During the raid, her violated body comes to symbolize the devastated Chinatown. As seen from the sand and phoenix metaphors, her
exploited body is transformed into a space in which she could achieve inner freedom
and rise above restrictions imposed by any spatial institution. Out of her objectiﬁed andexploited body, the author creates a utopian ‘her-land’ for Fu Sang. In this textually constructed space, Fu Sang ﬁnally ﬁnds a space to which she belongs. No longer is she theenslaved waif stranded in an alien country but she has become the heroine of a new
Chinese American myth.” (Feng, “Re-mapping,” 67–68). The covers of the British edition of the novel and the American edition of the novel are completely different, andFeng’s reading of the visual iconography would not be possible without the original
Chinese-language edition. The front cover of the Chinese-language ﬁrst edition of thebook may be seen at http://www.bookswindow.com/Asianbook/BookImages/
957081585x.jpg, accessed 30 September 2005. The front cover of the English-language
British edition may be seen at http://i3.yesasia.com/assets/84/776/p1003977684.jpg,
accessed 30 September 2005. The front cover of the English-language American edition
may be seen at http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0786866543.01._SCTZZZZZZZ_.jpg,
accessed 30 September 2005.
48
Sanehide Kodama, American Poetry and Japanese Culture (Hamden, Conn.: Archon
Books, 1985). One critic, David Ewick, notes that Kodama’s “Material on Fenollosa,
Pound, and Fenollosa’s notebooks is especially distinguished, the ﬁrst detailed examination by a scholar who reads Chinese, Japanese, and English and has examined thenotebooks. Shows that Fenollosa’s Chinese translations ‘contain almost exact, literal
renderings of the original Chinese poems,’ and attempts with some success to defend
Pound against accusations of incompetence resulting from his handling of the material.”David Ewick, “A Bibliography of Japan in English-Language Verse of the Early 20th
Century,” http://themargins.net/bib/A/59.htm, accessed 30 September 2005. A reviewerof Kodama’s book for Comparative Literature Studies found it “a triumph of transcultural understanding.” Morgan Gibson in Comparative Literature Studies 23 (1986):
85–90, cited in Ewick, “Bibliography.”49
Kun Jong Lee, “Princess Pari in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman,” positions
12:2 (2004): 431–456; Sung-Ae Lee, “Writing the Korean Diaspora,” unpublished paperdelivered at English Language and Literature Association of Korea, 2004 International
Conference, Seoul, June 15–18, 2004 (digest in English Studies in an Era of Globalization, ELLAK Conference Proceedings, 327–8).
50“The Americanization of Bapsi Sidhwa,” Bangladesh Journal of American Studies:7 & 8 (1994): 197–212.
51
Taiwanese scholars Wen-Ching Ho and Joan Chung-Huei Chang translated (respectively) Shawn Wong’s Homebase and Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moon
Faces into Chinese in the 1990s, and many of Amy Tan’s works were also translated
and published in Taiwan in the 1990s, as well. Chih-ming Wang notes that “At the sametime, more Chinese American writers got introduced: Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asianand Adeline Ma’s Falling Leaves are two of the successful cases. Besides the translated
works, immigrant writers are also highly regarded during this period: Yan Geling, Hong
Ying, Ha Jin, and Gao Xingjian are popular overseas ‘Chinese’writers.” (Chih-ming
Wang, “Feeling Asian American in Taiwan,” 8).

42
52

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN

Pin-chia Feng, “The Multicultural and Multiethnic Turn of American Literary
Studies in Taiwan,” unpublished essay in English. (I am grateful to Pin-chia Feng forsharing this material with me.) Chih-min Wang, of the University of California at Santa
Cruz, in an unpublished essay entitled “Thinking and Feeling Asian America in Taiwan,”
tracks Asian American studies in Taiwan to the late 1980s, when Lin Maozu’s essay,“The Identity Crisis of Chinatown Cowboys” was ﬁrst published. (I am grateful to Chihmin Wang for sharing this essay with me. The Chinese version of it has been publishedas “Yamei yanjiu zai Taiwan (Asian/American Studies in Taiwan),” Chung-wai Literary Monthly 33:1 (2004): 11–40). Wang notes that “Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club andDavid Henry Hwang’s M. Butterﬂy were well-received, not only for their own literary
merits, but also because of the ﬁlmic adaptation of both texts. In addition to Tan, Hwang,and Maxine Hong Kingston, the younger generation of Asian American writers, such as
Fae Myenne Ng, Jessica Hagedorn, Gish Jen, and Eric Liu, also became “prominent” inthe academies. The sudden rise of immigrant novels—by Hong Ying and Yan Geling,for instance—along with the success of Chinese ﬁlms—from Ang Lee’s Wedding
Banquet, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, to Jacky Chan’s Rush Hour I & II—in theinternational box ofﬁce have also enhanced the visibility of Asian America in Taiwan.”
53
Joan Chiung-Huei Chang, Transforming Chinese American Literature: A Study ofHistory, Sexuality and Ethnicity (New York: Peter Lang, 2000); Pin-chia Feng, EnGendering Chinese Americas: Reading Chinese American Women’s Fiction (Taipei:
Bookman, 1997). See also Pin-Chia Feng, The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrisonand Maxine Hong Kingston (New York: Peter Lang, 1998).
54
Pin-chia Feng notes in “The Multicultural and Multiethnic Turn of American
Literary Studies in Taiwan,” that “The publication of Chinese monographs on Chinese
American literature starts with the 1994 collection of essays edtied by Te-hsing Shanand Wen-ching Ho, Cultural Identity and Chinese American Literature,” which cameout of a 1993 conference on this subject. The volume includes discussions of texts by
Maxine Hong Kingston, Louis Chu, Frank Chin, and Henry David Hwang. Feng writes
that “Without exaggeration Cultural Identity and Chinese American Literature can be
regarded as the landmark publication in terms of the development of Taiwan’s Chinese
American Studies. A second collection of essays entitled Politics of Representation andChinese Americacn Literature, also edited by Ho and Shan, was published in 1996. . . .
The scope of this collection covers poetry from Angel Island, Chinese American autobiographical writings, Wong’s Homebase, Chin’s Gunga Din Highway, Gish Jen’s
Typical American, Ng’s Bone and an exploration of the butterﬂy image in a multicultural context.” Chung-Wai Literary Monthly published a special issue in 2001 on Chinese
American literature. Feng adds that beyond these collections of essays (and others currently in press) “the single most important monograph on Chinese American literature
in Chinese is Te-hsing Shan’s ‘Inscriptions and Representations: Chinese American
Literary and Cultural Studies’ that came out in 2000. The eleven essays included in themonograph represent nine years of Shan’s research efforts in the ﬁeld of Chinese
American literature. The topics range from English texts of Kingston, Frank Chin, Louis
Chu, Jade Snow Wong, Fay Myenne Ng, and Angel Island poetry and Chinese texts by
C.Y. Lee and Yan Geling to cultural texts of Arnold Genthe’s photographic representations of old San Francisco Chinatown. We see how Shan is constantly rethinking andremapping Chinese American literature and culture from a Taiwanese perspective,”
focusing in particular on “the problematic of subjectivity for Taiwanese scholars working on Chinese American literary and cultural studies.” (Feng, “Multicultural,” 5–6).
Te-hsing Shan’s fascinating article, “American Literary Studies in Taiwan” offers themost inclusive overview of the history of work on American literature by Taiwanese

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

43

scholars, from the early efforts of Limin Chu to the rich array of work produced today.
It includes listings of the numbers of books and articles devoted to speciﬁc American
writers published in Taiwan, and provides a useful English summary of bibliographic
articles on this topic written in Chinese by scholars such as Pin-chia Feng, Wen-ching
Ho, and Sherry Hsin-yin Li. (Te-hsing Shan, “American Literary Studies in Tawian.”
Paper presented at the 38th International Conference on “Korea/Asia and America:
Convergences and Ruptures,” October 30-November 1, 2003. American Studies Association of Korea, Chuncheon, Korea. I am grateful to Professor Shan for making thispaper available to me. It was published in Journal of American Studies 36:1 (Spring2004): 240–54 [Korea]. (See the following Chinese-language articles on this subject:
Feng, Pin-chia. “New English Literature and American Minority Literary Studies in
Taiwan,” part of the Joint Research Project on English and American Literary Studies
in Taiwan, sponsored by the National Science Council; Ho, Wen-ching, “TwentiethCentury Mainstream American Literary Studies in Taiwan,” Li, Sherry Hsin-yin, “Pre20th Century American Literary Studies in Taiwan.” (The preceding essays by Ho andLi were part of the Joint Research Project on English and American Literary Studies in
Taiwan sponsored by the National Science Council); Li, Sherry Hsin-yin. “The Studyof American Novels between WWI and WWII in Taiwan,” paper presented at the Conference on English and American Literary Studies in Taiwan: Retrospects and Prospects(Taipei: Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, Dec. 30–31,
2000); Shan, Te-hsing. “Literature/Criticism of Emergence—Asian American and
Native American Literary Studies in Taiwan,” Chung-Wai Literary Monthly 29:11(April 2001): 11–28; Shan, Te-hsing. “Institutionalization: A Preliminary Investigationof English and American Literary Studies in Taiwan,” Methods: Ways of Literature, ed.
Chang Han-liang (Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2002), 203–31.
55
Kyoko Norma Nozaki, Singing My Own Song (Kyoto: Yamaguchi Shoten, 2000);
Asian American Literature -Treading Past, Present and Future (Osaka: Kyoiku Tosho,2001); Reading Japanese American Literature: The Legacy of Three Generations(Osaka: Sogensha, 1997). See also Nozaki, “Four Generations of Japanese American
Women in the Works of Janice Mirikitani,” Acta Humanistica et Scientiﬁca 12:4 (1993):
216–250.
56
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “When Asian American Literature Leaves ‘Home,’ ” inNoelle Brada-Williams and Karen Chow, eds., Crossing Oceans: Reconﬁguring
American Literary Studies in the Paciﬁc Rim (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
2004), 29–40 (quotations from emailed ms. of essay provided by Wong). One recent
collections of essays related to Asian American literature published by Academia Sinica
came out of papers presented at a 2003 conference in Taiwan on “Negotiating the Past:
An International Conference on Asian British and Asian American Literatures.” A collection which appeared after Wong’s article was published is Chinese Language Literature in the United States, a special issue3 of the Chung Wai Literary Monthly guest editedby Te-hsing Shan (Vol. 34, No. 4, September 2005). This Chinese-language publication
includes Xiao-huang Yin’s “What’s in a Name: A Sociohistorical Study of ChineseLanguage Literature in America,” Pin-chia Feng’s “At Home and Elsewhere: Diasporic
Imagination and Transnational Migration in Mulberry and Peach,” Chih-min Wang’s“Between the American and the Chinese: Cultural Crossings and Interstitial Imaginationin Nieh Hua-ling’s Thousand Mountains Away, A River Flows,” and Wong’s “TheYellow and the Black: The African-American Presence in Sinophone Chinese American
Literature.” Americanists based in Asia are also increasingly publishing criticism on
American literature that does not focus on Asian American writers. A small samplingof some recent volumes include Contemporary Native North American Literature in44

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN

Metamorphosis: A Voice from the Margins, a special issue of Chung Wai LiteraryMonthly guest edited by Rose Hsiu-li Juan, Chung Wai Literary Monthly 33:8 (January2005), which includes articles on Native American authors including Joy Harjo, Louise
Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and others (in Chinese);
Liang-ya Liou’s Race, Gender, and Representation: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved (Taipei: Bookman, 2000) (in English); Toni
Morrison, conference proceedings in English of papers on Toni Morrison presented at
a conference on Morrison in held in Taiwan in 2004 sponsored by the Institute ofEuropean and American Studies, and Rose Hsiu-li Juan’s Fantasizing the Other Stories:
Salman Rushdie’s and Louise Erdrich’s Narratives from the Margins (Taipei: Bookman,
2000); Academia Sinica Masters Theses (in English) have been completed in Taiwan
since 2000 on writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rita Mae Brown, and Nella Larsen.
(Personal communication, Liang-ya Liou). Distinguished Japanese Twain scholar
Makoto Nagawara is writing a book on late Twain (expanding on ideas in his article“Ronen to Mark Twain (old age and Mark Twain),” Ritsumeikan Eibeibungaku 3(January 1994): 1–18), and a number of other leading Japanese Twain scholars such as
Masago Igawa, continue to publish books and articles on Twain in Japanese. See, forexample, Igawa bibliography available at http://www5.bureau.tohoku.ac.jp/Tunv_
Title_All.php?&user_num=000000000940&sel1=1&sel2=1&sel3=1&sel4=2&pa
ge=1&lang=E, accessed 1 October 2005; Yorimasa Nasu, “Oishi Mark Twain no
Tatakai—‘Kurayami ni Zaseru Hitobito’ eno Kenshin (the old Mark Twain’s ﬁght: hiscontribution to ‘the person sitting in darkness’ Tabard 9 (February 1994): 73–96. The
vitality of Mark Twain studies in Japan was apparent to me from a meetings I had withJapanese Twain scholars during trips to Kyoto, Tokyo, and Elmira, New York, during
the summer of 2005. A seminar with members of the Kansai Mark Twain circle organized by Ryo Waguri and presided over by Makoto Nagawara, with Yorimasa Nasu andother leading Twain scholars in attendance showed that Twain studies continue to thrive.
(Each of the scholars presented his or her work in progress. The group included, in
addition to those scholars mentioned, Ryo Waguri, Takeshi Omiya, Yuko Yamamoto,
Hitomi Kimura, Kotaro Nakagaki, David Zmijewski, and T. Kamogawa). For an
overview of Japanese scholarship written in 1999 see Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “President’s Column: Mark Twain in Japan,” Mark Twain Circular, August-September Vol.
13, No. 3. 1999 (Rpt. South Atlantic Review 65:1 (Fall 2000) at http://faculty.citadel.edu/
leonard/mtinjapan.htm, accessed 1 October 2005.
57
Chapter IV, of Su-ching Huang’s monograph, Mobile Homes: Spatial and Cultural
Negotiation in Asian American Literature (forthcoming from Routledge), entitled“Transnationality, Heterogeneity, and Spatial Negotiation in Asian American Fiction”
discusses the ways in which “class, gender, ethnicity and nationality complicate theinstances of boundary transgression in Ng’s Bone, Okada’s No-No Boy, and Mori’s
Yokohama, California.” She argues that “Put in the context of global displacement,
Asian transnationalism may serve to question hegemonic U.S. national culture but may
also promote the American dream myth by participating in model minority discourse.”
58
Scholars in Taiwan, for example, have produced more than forty masters theses in
American literature in recent years according to Te-hsing Shan (Chih-ming Wang,“Feeling Asian America in Taiwan,” 2.) Many of these deal with some aspect of Asian
American literature. Chih-ming Wang notes that Shan, a research fellow at Taiwan’s
Academia Sinica, “believes that Taiwan occupies a unique position, being situatedsimultaneously at the center and the periphery of both Chinese and American cultural
hegemony.” He argues that, “like the bicultural and bilingual contexts of Chinese
American literature, this position [that Taiwan shares with Chinese America] is under

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

45

the inﬂuences of China and the US, while somewhat distant to both” (Wang, “Feeling
Asian America in Taiwan,” 2). Wang notes that Shan believes that this “third space”
that “constantly swings and shuttles between the two centers and their peripheries, ” aspace shaped by but not totally dominated by the two cultural hegemonies of China andAmerica, can be a site of fruitful critical engagement. (Wang, 2); Shan, Te-hsing, Mingke
yu zaixian: huayi meiguo wenxue yu wenhua lunji (Inscription and Representation:
Essays on Chinese American Literature and Culture) (Taipei: Maitian, 2000), 26.
59
Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong explores Chinese responses to Maxine Hong Kingston inher essay, “When Asian American Literature Leaves ‘Home,’ ” in Noelle BradaWilliams and Karen Chow, eds., Crossing Oceans: Reconﬁguring American Literary
Studies in the Paciﬁc Rim (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 29–40, andin “Maxine Hong Kingston in a Global Frame,” unpublished keynote address presented
at the Asian American Literature Association’s (AALA) 15th Anniversary Forum,
Kyoto, Japan, 25 September 2004 (provided via email by the author). Sämi Ludwig
explores these issues particularly in connection with Kingston’s novel Tripmaster
Monkey: His Fake Book in “Celebrating Ourselves in the Other, Or: Who Controls theConceptual Allusions in Kingston?” in Asian American Litrature in the International
Context: Readings on Fiction, Poetry, and Performance, ed. Rocío G. Davis and Sämi
Ludwig [Contributions to Asian American Literary Studies] (Munich: Lit Verlag, 2002),
38–55.
60
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “An Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston.” American
Literary History, 3:4 (Winter 1991).
61
Sau-ling Wong, “When Asian-American Literature Leave Home.”
62
Chih-ming Wang, “Thinking and Feeling Asian America in Taiwan Thinking andFeeling Asian America in Taiwan,” unpublished conference paper. Chinese-language
version published in Chung-wai Literary Monthly. (Courtesy of the author).
63
All quotations about Paredes and Japan come from the manuscript for chapter 10 offorthcoming book, The Borderlands of Culture by Ramón Saldívar, provided via email
by courtesy of the author. For additional perspectives on the “creolized” and “hybrid”
dimensions of post-war Japan, a valuable source is Takeshi Matsuda, ed., The Age ofCreolization in the Paciﬁc: In Search of Emerging Cultures and Shared Values in theJapan-America Borderlands (Hiroshima: Keisuisha Press, 2001), which includes such
useful articles as David Blake Willis, “Creole times: Notes on Understanding Creolization for Transnational Japan-America,” Julie Higashi, “The Religious Occupation in
Postwar Japan: The Christian Community and Educational Institutions,” Joe B. Moore,“Japan, Jazz, and Creolization,” and David Blake Willis, “The Power of Hybridity inJapanese-American Relations.” See also E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating
Jazz in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
64
María Mendez Grever (1885–1951). “Besides performing dozens of Latin favorites
during a long career, María Mendez Grever wrote many of her own hits, including“Cuando Vuelva a Tu Lado,” “Júrame,” “Te Quiero Dijiste,” and “Ya No Me Quieres.”
Later in the 1950s, Lamento Gitano was recorded in jazzed up mambo versions by bothPérez Prado and Stan Getz.” Saldívar, chapter 10.
65
Ayako Ishigaki, Restless Wave: My Life in Two Worlds. Afterword by Yi-Chun
Tricia Lin and Greg Robinson (New York: The Feminist Press, 2004).
66
All quotations come from “The Legal Construction of ‘America’ in the ‘District ofChina,’ ” by Teemu Ruskola, 2 September, 2004 draft, presented at the “Legal Borderlands” conference American Quarterly held at Pomona, and subsequently published in
American Quarterly, 57:3 (September 2005). The special issue grows out of a conference
on “Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders” that American

46

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN

Quarterly co-sponsored with the Hart Center for American History at Pomona College,
USC Law School, and the USC Center for Law, History and Culture in September 2004.
67
See Christian Fritz, “A Nineteenth-Century ‘Habeas Corpus Mill’: The Chinese
Before the Federal Courts in California,” 32 Amer. J. Legal Hist. 347 (1988).
68
Personal communication, Danika Medak-Saltzman, 10/5/05, 10/07/05, and 10/10/05
about her UC-Berkeley Ph.D. dissertation in the department of Ethnic Studies.
69
Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America(New York: New York University Press, 2002) (Although most of this book focuses on
the Korean women’s experiences in the U.S., pages 19–83 address the encounters with
U.S. military personnel in Korea that preceded the women’s marriage and immigration
to the U.S.); Saundra Pollock and Brenda Stoltzfus Sturdevant, Let The Good Times
Roll: Prostitution And The U.S. Military In Asia (New York: The New Press, 1992).
70
Ryoko Kurihara, The Japanese Woman Suffrage Movement in Comparison with theAmerican Movement (Tokyo: Shinzansha, 2001); Laura Hein, “Citizens, Foreigners, andthe State: U.S. and Japan in the Wake of 9/11.” In Crossed Memories: Perspectives in
9/11 and American Power, edited by Laura Hein and Daizaburo Yui (Tokyo: Center for
Paciﬁc and American Studies, University of Tokyo, 2003). For more extensive comparative discussions of this topic, see Politics and the Past: On Repairing HistoricalInjustices, ed. John Torpey (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littleﬁeld, 2003), which
includes an essay by Hein on Japan, and essays by other scholars on the U.S., Canada,
Australia, Latin America and Africa, as well as theoretical discussions.
71
Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Marita
Sturken, “Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the JapaneseInternment” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-Paciﬁc War(s) eds. T. Fujitani, Geoffrey
M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 33–49.
72
See Lisa Yoneyama, “For Transformative Knowledge and Postnationalist Public
Spheres: The Smithsonian Enola Gay Controversy,” in Perilous Memories, eds. Fujitani,
White, and Yoneyama, 323–346. See also Elena Tajima Creef, “Museums, Memory andManzanar: Contesting Our National Japanese American Past through a Politics of Visibility,” in Creef, Imagining Japanese America, 119–144.
73
The history of Japanese textbook revision debates is discussed in Perilous Memories, ed. Fujitani, White and Yoneyama, 23, 57, 61–64, 66, 69, 299, 334.
74
See, for example, Michele Malkin, In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial
Proﬁling” in World War II and the War on Terror (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, August 2004); “Muller and Robinson on Malkin” http://www.isthatlegal.org/
Muller_and_Robinson_on_Malkin.html, accessed 10 May 2005; Richard Leiby, “AU’sCampus Republicans Fence Michelle Malkin Out,” The Washington Post, 12 September
2004, D03, accessed 10 May 2005, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/
A15622–2004Sep12.html; “Michelle Malkin defended WWII internment, racial proﬁling today; said Mineta’s view ‘clouded’ by his internment,” Media Matters for America,
accessed 10 May 2005, http://mediamatters.org/items/200408110001; Emil Guillermo,“Internment Camp Redux,” SFGate.com, 7 September 2001, accessed 10 May 2005,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2004/09/07/eguillermo.DTL; “Dangerous Revisionist History Reviving ‘Military Necessity’ Argument”—In Defense of Internment—essays and articles, http://www.densho.org/about/revisionism.asp, accessed 10 May 2005; History News Network August 31, 2004,
http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=40982, accessed 10 May 2005; Lydia Lin, “‘Living’ History Lesson Revives Emotions, Debate. Washington State’s Sakai Middle
School says the community supports its internment curriculum. An outspoken opponent

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

47

is barred from school property.” IM Diversity, accessed 10 May 2005, http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/asian/education_academia_study/pc_school_internment_0205.asp;
Danny Westneat, “Yes The Internment Of Japanese Americans Was Wrong And
Schools Should Teach That,” Seattle Times, 8 September 2004, History News Network,
http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/7290.html, accessed 10 May 2005.
75
As we pay more attention to public memory and monuments in comparative perspective, one lucid model here is James Young’s book The Texture of Memory (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1994), which examines Holocaust monuments and museums in Austria, Germany, Israel and the U.S., comparing how each nation memorializes the Holocaust according to its own traditions, ideals and experiences, as well as
Young’s At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art andArchitecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) which compares the construction of Holocaust monuments around the world by artists born after 1945. Another modelis Sanford Levinson’s book Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies(Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), which includes comparative discussions of how
Eastern European societies deal with Soviet-Era monuments and how various cities in
the American South deal with monuments to the Confederacy.
76
A recent article which discusses U.S. and Japanese responses to legal suits involving U.S. and Japanese responsibility for the comfort women and potential vehicles for
redress is Clair Kwon, “‘I Will Be Forgotten’: The Contemporary Pursuit of Legal
Redress for Korean Comfort Women,” Yale Manifesta 1:1 (Spring/Summer 2005):
46–57.
77
Ursula K. Heise, “Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experienceof Place,” Comparative Literature Studies 14:1 (2004): 127. See also Shu-ching Chen,“Magic Capitalism and Melodramatic Imagination—Producing Locality and Reconstructing Asian Ethnicity in Karen Tei Kamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest,”
EurAmerica 34:4 (December 2004): 587–624.
78
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1995). Fukuko
Kobayashi, “Producing Asian American Spaces: From Cultural Nation to the Space ofHybridity as Represented in Texts by Asian American Writers,” The Japanese Journalof American Studies 13 (2002): 76–77, http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/jaas/periodicals/JJAS/,
accessed 25 April 2005. Kobayashi references Laura Kang, “Dictée by Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha,” A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, eds. Stephen Sumida andSau-ling Wong (New York: Modern Language Association, 2001), 32–33. 35. See also
Elaine Kim, “Poised on the In-between: A Korean American’s Reﬂections on Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” Writing Self, Writing Nation, ed. Elaine Kim and Norma
Alarcom (Berkeley: Third Woman’s Press, 1994); Laura Kang, “Dictée by Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha,” A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, eds. Stephen Sumida andSau-ling Wong (New York: Modern Language Association, 2001). See also Kun Jong
Lee, “Rewriting Hesiod, Revisioning Korea: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée as a
Subversive Hesiodic Catalogue of Women,” forthcoming in College Literature.
79
Britta Erikson, On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West,exhibition Catalog published in conjunction with exhibition organized by the Iris & B.
Gerald Cantor Center fo the Visul Arts at Stanford University (January 26-May 1, 2005),(Stanford, Ca.: Cantor Center for Visual Arts, 2005), 22
80
On the Edge, 22. These works are included in the exhibition catalog. “Long Live
Chairman Mao” is Figure 92, p. 88.
81
Zhang Huan, “My New York #1” in On the Edge, cover, and Figure 70, p.67 and“My New York #4,” p. 68. See also On the Edge, 66–69 for discussion of this performance piece.

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Erickson, On The Edge, 69.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “The Center Can(not) Hold: American Studies and Global
Feminism.” American Studies International 38:3 (October 2000): 28. Lim references
Sonni Efron, “Eating Disorders Go Global,” Los Angeles Times, 18 October 1997, A1
for her statistic on eating disorders in Japan.
84
Lim, “The Center Can(not) Hold,” 28–30.
85
Lim, “The Center Can(not) Hold,” 31.
86
Lin Shu, “Translator’s Notes to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in R. David Arkush and Leo
O. Lee, eds, Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the MidNineteenth Century to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 77;
In his translator’s preface, Liu Shu wrote that he wanted his translation to “serve as awarning to Chinese readers who favor the white race . . . under the erroneous illusionthat the Westerners are generous with vassals” (77). See also Leo Oufan Lee, “Lin Shu
and His Translations: Western Fiction in Chinese Perspective,” Papers on China 19(1965): 159–93. Lin Shu’s original translator’s note appeared in Lin Su, “‘Hei nu yu tianlu’ shu” (Preface to ‘A Black Slave’s Cry to Heaven’) reprinted in Aying (Qian
Xingcun), ed., Fan Mei Hua gong jinyue wenxue ji (A collection of literature written in
opposition to American exclusion of Chinese laborers) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960).
87
Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Mark Twain in Japan: The Cultural Reception of an American
Icon (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 28.
88Ishihara, Mark Twain in Japan, 27.
89
Ishihara, Mark Twain in Japan, 36–88. See also Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Mark Twain in
Japan: Mark Twain’s Literature and 20 th Century Japanese Juvenile Literature andPopular Culture (Ph.D. Dissertation, American Studies Department, University ofTexas at Austin, 2003).
90
Guiyou Huang, “Whitman in China,” in Gay Wilson Allen & Ed Folsom, eds., Walt
Whitman & the World (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 406–422; Le
Yeguang, “Walt Whitman in China,” in Allen & Folsom, eds. Walt Whitman & theWorld, 425–428; Liu Rongquing, “Whitman’s Soul in China: Guo Moruo’s Poetry in
the New Culture Movement,” in Ed Folsom, ed., Whitman East & West: New Contexts
for Reading Walt Whitman (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002), 172–186; Ou
Hong, “Pantheistic Ideas in Guo Muruo’s The Goddesses and Whitman’s Leaves ofGrass,” in Folsom, ed., Whitman East & West, 187–196; Wang Ning, “Modernity andWhitman’s Reception in Chinese Literature,” in Folsom, ed., Whitman East & West,
197–207; Liu Shusen, “Gu Cheng and Walt Whitman,” in Folsom, ed. Whitman East &West, 208–220; Guiyou Huang, Whitmanism, Imagism, and Modernism in China andAmerica (Selingsgrove [Pa.]: Susquehanna University Press; Cranbury, NJ: Associated
University Presses, 1997). An analogous trajectory can inform scholarship as well. A
young Taiwanese scholar, for example, recently argued at her dissertation defense that
her work on multicultural American literature provided her with valuable insights into
her native Taiwan. Pin-chia Feng writes, “I still remember during my oral defense I wasquestioned by my committee members about the relevancy of my dissertation on
Kingston and Morrison to the Taiwanese context. I believe my answer at that time, thatthe study of multicultural American literature provides me with a better perspective tounderstand my own country and society, still rings true today.” (Feng, “Multicultural,”
6–7).
91
Scott Wong, “The Transformation of Culture: Three Chinese Views of America,”
American Quarterly 48:2 (1996): 201–232.
92
Hitomi Nabae, “Translation as Criticism: A Century of James Appreciation in
Japan,” (Global James Special Issue) The Henry James Review 24:1 (Winter 2003): 251.
82
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49

Aviad Raz, Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
94
Masako Notoji, Dizun ı̄rando to iu seichi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990).
95
One example of this kind of project (extending into ﬁlm) is Takayuki Tatsumi, “FullMetal Apache—Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo Diptych: The Impact of American Narratives upon the Japanese Representation of Cyborgian Identity,” in the Japanese
Journal of American Studies 7 (1996): 25–47, as well as Tatsumi’s book, Full Metal
Apache, forthcoming from Duke University Press.
96
Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture and the English Novel in
India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). (Co-winner of the MLA prize forthe “best ﬁrst book,” 2003); Kaiser Haq, “American Impact on Bengali and Indo-AnglianPoetry,” Bangladesh Journal of American Studies 2 (Summer 1988): 24–35.
97
See, for example, Seongcheol Kim, “Cultural Imperialism on the Internet,” InterculturalRelations.com (Fall 1998), accessed 6 November 2004, http://www.interculturalrelations.com/v1i4Fall1998/f98kim.htm; Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake,eds., Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1996); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Michael
Grifﬁn, “From Cultural Imperialism to Transnational Commercialization: Shifting
Paradigms in International Media Studies,” Global Media Journal 1:1 (Fall 2002),
accessed 1 December 2004, http://lass.calumet.purdue.edu/cca/gmj/SubmittedDocuments/archivedpapers/Fall2002/Grifﬁn.htm; Claude-Jean Bertrand, “American Cultural
Imperialism—A Myth?” American Studies International 25 (April 1987): 46–60; John
Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991);
Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Paciﬁc: From South Paciﬁc to Bamboo Ridge
and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
98
Christine M.E. Guth, Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004).
99
Ryan Bishop and Lillian Robinson, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai
Economic Miracle (New York: Routledge, 1998).
100
Ryan Bishop, “Consuming States,” in Kousar Azam, ed., Rediscovering America:
American Studies in the New Century (New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 2001;
Colorado Springs: International Academic Publishers, 2002), 279.
101
Yujin Yaguchi and Mari Yoshihara. “Evolutions of ‘Paradise’: Japanese Tourist
Discourse About Hawai‘i,” American Studies 45:3 (Fall 2004): 81–106.
102
Heike Paul has noted that “the culinary sphere provides a realm of cultural contact
beyond the immediate consumption of food as a terrain on which racial attitudes andspeciﬁcities become visible and American democratic values are negotiated.” “Tasting
America: Food, Race, and Anti-American Sentiments in Nineteenth-Century GermanAmerican Writing” in Tobias Döring, Markus Heide, Susanne Mühleisen, eds., Eating
Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food [American Studies monograph series 106](Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2003), 129.
103
Sangmee Bak, “McDonald’s in Seoul: Food choices, Identity, and Nationalism” in
J.L. Watson, ed., Golden, 136–60; Golden Arches East (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 136–60.
104
Rüdiger Kinow, “Eating Indian(s): Food, Representation, and the Indian Diaspora
in the United States,” in Döring, Heide, and Susanne Mühleisen, eds., Eating Culture,
151–175.
105
Su-Ching Huang, “‘We just Cooked Chinese Food!’: Gastronomic Mobility andModel Minority Discourse in David Wong Louie’s Novel The Barbarians Are Coming,”
93

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Chapter III in her book, Mobile Homes: Spatial and Cultural Negotiation in Asian
American Literature, forthcoming from Routledge.
106
Wilfried Russert, “Minority Discourses, Foodways, and Aspects of Gender:
Contemporary Writings by Asian-American Women.” Journal X 7:2 (Spring 2003):
194; see also Rachel Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered
Fictions of Nation and Transnation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
107
John Carlos Rowe, “Response: Towards Critical Internationalism,” Interroads Discussion List, Crossroads, http://crossroads.georgetown.edu/interroads/rowe.html, accessed 20 September 2004.
108
This proverb may be better known by the more common variant, “Der vorem inkhreyn meynt az dos lebn iz zis,” but the version cited above is the one my father always
used, and the one with which I grew up.
109
Zhou Baodi, ed., The United States in Times of War and Peace (Beijing: Foreign
Language Teaching and Research Press, 2005); Zhou Zhen, “A Comparison of G.W.
Bush’s Inaugural Speeches, 2001 and 2005,” 201–206; Cai Chuihong, “From Korean
War to Iraq War: Change of American Attitude Toward Dover Test,” 256–269; Wang
Shijing, “Multilingualism or Unilingualism?—A Historical Review of the National
Language Policies in the United States,” 147–153. This volume, which came out of an
American Studies conference at Yunnan University co-sponsored by the U.S.-China
Education Trust, also includes my keynote address, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Wars of
Words: American Writers and War,” 1–26.
110
Kousar J. Azam, ed., Rediscovering America: American Studies in the New Century(New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 2001; paperback, Colorado Springs: International
Academic Publishers/South Asian Publishers, 2002)] Kousar J. Azam, “Internationalization of American Studies and the Emerging Paradigms: An Indian Perspective,”329–51; Prafulla C. Kar, “The Future of American Studies,” 25–33; R.S. Sharma, “Reinventing America and American Studies: The World’s Parliament of Religions, Chicago,
1893,” 102–13; Sukhbir Singh, “The Hindu Inﬂuence on Postmodern American
Novelists: Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Updike, Jerzy Kosinski,” 213–26; Isaac
Siqueira, “Popular Culture Studies,” Rui Kohiyama, “From Ecumenism to Internationalism: American Women’s Cross-Paciﬁc Endeavor to Promote Women’s Colleges in
the Orient,” 265–77.
111
Yusheng Yang, “The War Experiences and Chinese Views of America: A Case
Study of Mao Tse-tung’s Images of the United States, 1931–1949,” in Laura Hein andDaizaburo Yui, eds., Crossed Memories: Perspectives on 9/11 and American Power(Tokyo: Center for Paciﬁc and American Studies, University of Tokyo, 2003), 117–38;
Yujin Yaguchi, “Japanese Visitor Experiences at the Arizona Memorial,” in Hein andYui, eds., Crossed Memories, 138–51. Important bibliographies in American Studies are
sometimes published outside the U.S., as well. For example, what is probably the mostextensive annotated bibliography on the Japanese in North America, the 1038-page
Japaner in der Neuen Welt, was published in Germany. Hans Dieter Ölschleger and Eva
König, with Barbara Ölschleger, Japaner in der Neuen Welt: Eine teilannotierte Bibliographie von Werken zu japanischen Einwanderem in Nordamerika in europäischen
Sprachen (Bibliographische Arbeiten aus dem Deutschen Institut für Japanstudien derPhilipp Franz von Siebold Stiftung) (Munich: Iudicium, 1997).
112
Mary A. Knighton, “‘Was Huck Burak(k)u?’ Reading and Teaching Twain in Asian
Paciﬁc World Literature,” Mark Twain Studies 1:1 (October 2004): 90–110.
113
Citing Asako Nakai, Tatsumi describes the central role played by a copy ofConnecticut Yankee found unexpectedly in the “war-torn Vietnamese forest” by the narrator in an important Japanese nonﬁction novel by Takeshi Kaiko, Kagayakeru Yami

ASIAN CROSSROADS/ TRANSNATIONAL AMERICAN STUDIES

51(translated into English under the title Into a Black Sun): “This unusual discovery leads
the narrator to imagine Twain’s novel to be really a neo-imperialistic ploy to spread thelight of civilization,” Tatsumi writes. “While the period of postwar reconstruction helped
the Japanese people sympathize with the character of Huck Finn, that of high economic
growth at the critical point of the Vietnam War invited us to turn from Huck to privilege instead the narrative of Hank Morgan.” Takayuki Tatsumi, “Editor’s Column,”
Mark Twain Studies 1:1 (October 2004): 3–4. The journal also has a useful compendiumof abstracts of books, dissertations, and English-language essays published during thelast three years by Mark Twain scholars in Japan.
114
Fukuko Kobayashi, “Producing Asian American Spaces: From Cultural Nation to
the Space of Hybridity as Represented in Texts by Asian American Writers,” The
Japanese Journal of American Studies 13 (2002): 63–81.
115
http://www.americanquarterly.org/index.php/resources/country/C8/, accessed 1
October 2005. See also www.theasa.net.
116
Etsuko Taketani, U.S. Women Writers and the Discourses of Colonialism, 1825–
1861 (Knoxville: Univerisity of Tennessee Press, 2003); Tsuyoshi Ishihara, Mark Twain
in Japan: The Cultural Reception of an American Icon (Columbia, Mo.: University ofMissouri Press, 2005).
117
Email to author from Jay Mechling (and attached syllabus for course), 20 November
2004.
118
International partnership grants that have been awarded and guidelines for applications are available at the ASA web site (www.theasa.net).
119
ASA International Partnership grants can support everything from sharing books,
videos and curricular materials, to developing student and faculty exchanges, collaborative courses, joint degree programs, and collaborative research projects. Details on
how to apply may be accessed at http://georgetown.edu/crossroads/AmericanStudies
Assn/newsletter/archive/newsarchive/intgrant.htm, accessed 13 November 2005.
120
Annette Kolodny, In Search of First Contact: The Peoples Of The Dawnland, The
Vikings Of Vineland and American Popular Culture, unpublished manuscript, “Preface,” 1.
121
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Lighting Out for the Territory: Reﬂections on Mark Twain
and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Scholars with whom
I corresponded as I researched the book included Wu Bing and Mei Renyi from China,
Prafulla Kar in India, and Makoto Nagawara, Hiroshi Okubo, and Hiroyoshi Ichikawa
from Japan.
122
The international forum on “The War Prayer” that we are co-editing will appear in
the forthcoming issue of Mark Twain Studies.
123
I am grateful to the foundations and institutions that supported my trips to conferences and universities in Asia between 1999 and 2005. These include the FulbrightCommission, the Kyoto American Studies Summer Seminar, the U.S.-Japan Friendship
Commission, Ritsumeikan University, the Tokyo American Center, Japanese Association for American Studies, Kyoto University, Doshisha University, Keio University,
Kyoto Koka Women’s University, Waseda University, the Kansai Mark Twain Circle,
the American Studies Association of Korea, Korea University, the English Language
and Literature Association of Korea, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, the U.S.
China Education Trust, Fudan University, Yunnan University, the U.S. Embassies inTokyo, Seoul and Beijing, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and the National Science Councilof Taiwan. I wish there were space to thank the many individual scholars whose
hospitality and generosity made these visits so memorable. I am deeply in their debt. I
am also grateful to the Fulbright Commission, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the52

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U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, the Japanese Association for American Studies, theAmerican Studies Association of Korea, the U.S. China Education Trust, the Asia Foundation, and, of course, the American Studies Association, for having sponsored trips by
Asian scholars to U.S. to annual meetings of the American Studies Association and to
American universities.
124
For more on Wright at the World Columbian Exposition, see, http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/1469/ﬂw_jp.html; for more on Wright and Japan, see Kevin Nute, Frank
Lloyd Wright and Japan: The Role of Traditional Japanese Art and Architecture in theWork of Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994); and Frank Lloyd
Wright Home and Studio Foundation (Corporate Author), Melanie Birk (Editor), Frank
Lloyd Wright’s Fifty Views of Japan: The 1905 Photo Album (San Francisco, Ca.:
Pomegranate Artbooks, 1996).