Lye America's Asia

Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2643-8
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

What explains the perception of Asians both as economic exemplars and as threats? America's Asia explores a discursive tradition that affiliates the East with modern efficiency, in contrast to more familiar primitivist forms of Orientalism. Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a "model minority" or a "yellow peril"--two aspects of what she calls "Asiatic racial form"-- to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization proceeded in tandem with the nation's neocolonial expansion beyond its continental frontier.

From Progressive efforts to regulate corporate monopoly to New Deal contentions with the crisis of the Great Depression, a particular racial mode of social redress explains why turn-of-the-century radicals and reformers united around Asian exclusion and why Japanese American internment during World War II was a liberal initiative.

In Lye's reconstructed archive of Asian American racialization, literary naturalism and its conventions of representing capitalist abstraction provide key historiographical evidence. Arguing for the profound influence of literature on policymaking, America's Asia examines the relationship between Jack London and leading Progressive George Kennan on U.S.-Japan relations, Frank Norris and AFL leader Samuel Gompers on cheap immigrant labor, Pearl S. Buck and journalist Edgar Snow on the Popular Front in China, and John Steinbeck and left intellectual Carey McWilliams on Japanese American internment. Lye's materialist approach to the construction of race succeeds in locating racialization as part of a wider ideological pattern and in distinguishing between its different, and sometimes opposing, historical effects.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lye, Colleen

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde Minderheiten, Interkulturelle & Multikulturelle Fragen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturpolitik, Kulturmanagement
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gewalt und Diskriminierung: Soziale Aspekte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Regierungspolitik Kultur-, Wissenschafts- & Technologiepolitik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The Minority Which Is Not One 1

Chapter One: A Genealogy of the "Yellow Peril" 12

Jack London, George Kennan, and the Russo-Japanese War

Chapter Two: Meat versus Rice 47

Frank Norris, Jack London, and the Critique of Monopoly Capitalism

Chapter Three: The End of Asian Exclusion? 96

The Specter of "Cheap Farmers" and Alien Land Law Fiction

Chapter Four: A New Deal for Asians 141

John Steinbeck, Carey McWilliams, and the Liberalism of Japanese-American Internment

Chapter Five: One World 204

Pearl S. Buck, Edgar Snow, and John Steinbeck on Asian American Character

Notes 255

Works Cited 301

Index 329

Über Autor(innen)

Colleen Lye is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an editorial board member of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Representations.