Modernism and Asian American Writers

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audrey Wu Clark
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Literary Anthologies ◽  
Political Solidarity

In her pathbreaking book Asian American Panethnicity (1992), Yen Le Espiritu traces Asian American panethnicity to the Yellow Power movement of the civil rights era of the 1960s. Thereafter the political struggles of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Filipino Americans were documented in literature and studied in literary anthologies such as Frank Chin et al.’s Aiiieeeee! (1974) and David Hsin-Fu Wand’s Asian-American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (1974). However, early Asian American literature suggests that Asian American consciousness emerged earlier than the civil rights era. During the era of Chinese exclusion (1882–1943), Chinese American writers such as Lee Yan Phou, Sui Sin Far, and Onoto Watanna—Sui Sin Far’s sister, who wrote under a Japanese pseudonym—wrote about Chinese American and Japanese American experiences. The subsequent era of Japanese exclusion (1907–1945) brought about the modernist haiku poetry of Japanese American writers Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the Popular Front era of the 1930s that various forms of panethnic and queer Asian American political consciousness emerged in the literature of Korean American writer Younghill Kang, Filipino American writers Carlos Bulosan (who mentions Kang in his novel, America Is In the Heart) and José García Villa, and Chinese American writer H. T. Tsiang. The politically progressive Popular Front of the 1930s, together with the influence of experimental literary forms of high modernism from just a decade before, set the stage for the Asian American panethnicity and queer consciousness that are described in the works of Kang and Bulosan, and Villa and Tsiang, respectively. Kang’s autobiographical novels The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937) and Bulosan’s novel, America Is in the Heart (1943) exhibit important thematic influences by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Likewise, Villa’s Have Come, Am Here (1942) and Tsiang’s novels The Hanging on Union Square (1935) and And China Has Hands (1937) demonstrate the influence of queer modernist Gertrude Stein. Just a few decades earlier, Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann were both writing modernist haikus that responded to those of their friend Ezra Pound. However, without the language of political solidarity that the Popular Front provided, Noguchi’s and Hartmann’s politics, implicit in their poetry, remained overlooked by critics until the 1990s.

“Katrina is the Mother We Will Remember Until the Next Mother”

2019 ◽  
pp. 61-90
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Hurricane Katrina ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Social ◽  
Long Division

This chapter analyzes representations of Hurricane Katrina in African American literature to argue that the storm served to illustrate the entrenchment of structural racism and the importance of a specifically racialized tradition in African American literature. Adopting the theoretical framework of “slow violence,” the chapter analyzes two novels which depict both the storm and its aftermath: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) and Kiese Laymon’sLong Division (2013). In the context of the early twenty-first century, these representations of Katrina do not displace the social advancements of African Americans but instead force recognition of the incompleteness not only of specific political battles but also of ongoing race, gender, and class-based narratives, thereby questioning the optimism of a rhetoric of post-Blackness. In particular, the novels establish continuity between Civil Rights Era traumas and struggles and Hurricane Katrina to push against a rhetoric focused on the transcendence of the past.

Politics in Other Ways

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-287
Author(s):  
Maki Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Racial Harmony ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The City

This article explores the ways that Seattle’s Asian American—and in particular Japanese American—community negotiated the shifting terrain of racial politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. While Seattle’s city leaders—and indeed many in the civil rights establishment—heralded the city for its racial liberalism, a young cadre of activists organized across racial and ethnic boundaries and challenged established leadership to articulate a robust, anti-racist, working-class multiracial politics. Significantly, the rise of Black and Asian anti-racist solidarities exploded the city’s narrative of exceptional racial harmony in an age of social crisis. Activists adopted a capacious definition of community that could acknowledge specific identities while simultaneously coalescing around a shared sense of injury. They also practiced a form of grassroots politics that was flexible and improvisational, that was enacted both within and outside established organizations and channels, and that ultimately blurred the distinction between moderation and radicalism.

The Chinese Exclusion Act and Early Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Railton
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Laws And Policies ◽  
Immigration Station ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Exclusion Act

The 19th century featured two opposed yet interconnected historical trends: the growth of a multigenerational and deeply rooted Chinese American community; and the development of the cultural prejudices and fears comprised by the Yellow Peril narrative. Those xenophobic fears produced violence, social and political movements, and legal exclusions, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and its many follow-up laws and policies, all designed as much to destroy the existing Chinese American community as to restrict future immigration. But out of that period of exclusion and oppression came some of the first Chinese American literary and cultural works published in both Mandarin/Cantonese and English: the personal and collective poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station by detainees; auto-ethnographic memoirs of Chinese American life and community such as Yung Wing’s My Life in China and America (1909); and the journalistic, autobiographical, and fictional works of Edith Maude Eaton/Sui Sin Far, the first Chinese American professional creative writer. These works both reflect and transcend the realities of the Exclusion era, helping contemporary audiences understand those histories, connect them to later Chinese American writers, and analyze the exclusionary debates and proposals of the early 21st century.

Global China in 21st-Century Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunny Xiang
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
English Language ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
Chinese Descent

Contemporary English-language prose and poetry writers, primarily of Chinese descent, are employing a range of stylistic strategies and exploring increasingly diverse themes in their representations of China and Chineseness. Through these representations, these contemporary writers build on, adapt, and contest a historically complex relation between “global” and “China” within an American imaginary. Twenty-first-century literary novelists and poets raise many questions about this relationship. These literatures of and about “Global China” both extend from and depart from, a “Chinese American” literary tradition. For instance, writers such as Jenny Zhang, Sharlene Teo, and Wang Weike are reworking long-standing narrative tropes such as intergenerational strife and transforming conventionally ethnic genres such as the autobiography. Contemporary literary works also take more heterogeneous approaches to referencing the United States and even “the West” more generally. And, unlike a prior tradition of Chinese American literature, these works open us to consider multiple kinds of China that far exceed the putative origin point of Mainland China (the most famous instance is Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, which features Singaporeans of Chinese descent). On the flip side, representations of “Global China” may lack representations of identifiably “Chinese” characters (for instance, Rachel Khong’s Goodbye Vitamin). In other cases, Chinese characters may be relegated to a role, or Chineseness may be insignificant to a story’s plot. New themes and topics are emerging, most notably adoption, biraciality, mental health, and return-to-Asian journeys. Finally, the literatures of Global China include robust outgrowths of genre literature, ranging from speculative fiction to detective fiction. Writers of genre fiction include Ovidia Yu and Ted Chiang.

“A Cross-Fire between Minorities”

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 667-701
Author(s):  
Jane Hong
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian American ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Immigrant Rights ◽  
Caribbean Community ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
Black Immigration

This article examines the Japanese American Citizens League’s (JACL) postwar campaign to secure U.S. citizenship eligibility for first-generation Japanese (Issei) as a civil rights effort that brought Japanese Americans into contention with African American and Afro-Caribbean community leaders during the height of the U.S. Cold War in East Asia. At the same time, JACL’s disagreements with Chinese Americans and Japanese American liberals precluded any coherent Japanese or Asian American position on postwar immigration policy. The resulting 1952 McCarran-Walter Act formally ended Asians’ exclusion from U.S. immigration and naturalization, even as a colonial quota in the law severely restricted black immigration from the Caribbean and galvanized black protest. This episode of black-Japanese tension complicates scholarly understandings of the liberalization of U.S. immigration and naturalization laws toward Asian peoples as analogous with or complementary to black civil rights gains in the postwar years. In so doing, it suggests the need to think more critically and historically about the cleavages between immigration and civil rights law, and between immigrant rights and civil rights.

Labor Pains

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christin Marie Taylor
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Black Radicalism ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
Imagined Lives ◽  
And Gender

Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work and Sex in the South is about southern modernist fictions centered on the imagined lives of black folk workers from the 1930s to the 1960s. This period encompasses the clashes surrounding New Deal-era policy reforms and their legacies as well as a surge in Popular Front artistic expressions from the Depression, to World War II, to the Civil Rights era and following. Labor Pains sets out to show that black working-class representations of the Popular Front have not only been about the stakes of race and labor but also call upon an imagined black folk to do other work. The book considers tropes of black folk workers across genres of southern literature to demonstrate the reach of black radicalism and how the black folk worker was used to engage the representative feelings we think we know and the affective feelings that remained unsaid. Labor Pains emphasizes feeling, namely the sensual and the sexual, imbued in narratives by George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Eudora Welty, and Sarah Elizabeth Wright. Each employs tropes of black folk workers to get a fuller picture of gender and desire during this time. As a result, a glimpse into feminist and gender-aware aspects of the outgrowths of black radicalism come into view.

After the Storm

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lon Kurashige
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Japanese American Internment ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Popular Interest

This chapter examines the final end of formal anti-Asian policies in the Immigration Act of 1965, which gave Asian nations equal immigration quotas with all other nations in the world. An important part of this egalitarian context was Hawaii statehood because the new state’s large Asian American constituency boosted this group’s political influence in Congress. At the same time, the civil rights and anti-war movements and protests rooted in the Asian American movement during the long 1960s stirred scholarly and popular interest in the history of Asian exclusion and Japanese American internment that flowered throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries into a robust cultural memory that, curiously, occluded the significance of the egalitarian opposition to anti-Asian racism. Instead, the picture of the past was stark, emphasizing racism, injustice, victimization, and white domination.

Flashpoints for Asian American Studies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Asian American Studies ◽  
Student Protest ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
At Home

Born out of mid-century social movements, Civil Rights Era formations, and anti-war protests, Asian American studies is now an established field of transnational inquiry, diasporic engagement, and rights activism. These histories and origin points analogously serve as initial moorings for Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, a collection which considers—almost fifty years after its student protest founding—the possibilities of and limitations inherent in Asian American studies as historically entrenched, politically embedded, and institutionally situated interdiscipline. Unequivocally, Flashpoints for Asian American Studies investigates the multivalent ways in which the field has—and, at times and more provocatively, has not—responded to various contemporary crises, particularly as they are manifest in prevailing racist, sexist, homophobic, and exclusionary politics at home, ever-expanding imperial and militarized practices abroad, and neoliberal practices in higher education.

scholarly journals Strategic Hybridity in Early Chinese and Japanese American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Floyd Cheung
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Chinese Character ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
Japanese American Literature

Early Chinese and Japanese American male writers between 1887 and 1938 such as Yan Phou Lee, Yung Wing, Sadakichi Hartmann, Yone Noguchi, and H. T. Tsiang accessed dominant US publishing markets and readerships by presenting themselves and their works as cultural hybrids that strategically blended enticing Eastern content and forms with familiar Western language and structures. Yan Phou Lee perpetrated cross-cultural comparisons that showed that Chinese were not unlike Europeans and Americans. Yung Wing appropriated and then transformed dominant American autobiographical narratives to recuperate Chinese character. Sadakichi Hartmann and Yone Noguchi combined poetic traditions from Japan, Europe, and America in order to define a modernism that included cosmopolitans such as themselves. And H. T. Tsiang promoted Marxist world revolution by experimenting with fusions of Eastern and Western elements with leftist ideology. Although these writers have been discounted by some critics as overly compromising in their attempts to reach Western readers, they accomplished laudable cultural work in their particular historical circumstances and provide insights into the varied and complicated negotiations of Asian American identity during the exclusion era.

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