America's Asia
Subtitle: racial form and American literature, 1882-1945
By: Colleen Lye.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 342
Subjects: American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Asian Americans in literature.; Orientalism -- United States.; Orientalism in literature.; Race in literature.; Asia -- Foreign public opinion, American.; Asia -- Relations -- United States.; United States -- Relations -- Asia.; Asia -- In literature.
Description: What explains the perception of Asians both as economic exemplars and as threats? America's Asia explores a discursive tradition that affiliates the East with modern efficiency, in contrast to more familiar primitivist forms of Orientalism. Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a "model minority" or a "yellow peril"--Two aspects of what she calls "Asiatic racial form"--to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization proceeded in tandem with the nation's neocolonial expansion beyond its continental frontier. From Progressive efforts to regulate corporate monopoly to New Deal contentions with the crisis of the Great Depression, a particular racial mode of social redress explains why turn-of-the-century radicals and reformers united around Asian exclusion and why Japanese American internment during World War II was a liberal initiative. This book examines the relationship between Jack London and leading Progressive George Kennan on U.S.-Japan relations, Frank Norris and AFL leader Samuel Gompers on cheap immigrant labor, Pearl S. Buck and journalist Edgar Snow on the Popular Front in China, and John Steinbeck and left intellectual Carey McWilliams on Japanese American internment.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p.  ) and index.