A01=Colleen Lye
Agriculture
Alien land laws
American frontier
American imperialism
Americans
Anti-capitalism
Anti-Japanese sentiment
Asian American studies
Asian Americans
Asiatic mode of production
Author_Colleen Lye
Capitalism
Category=JH
Category=JPS
Chinese Exclusion Act
Citizenship
Class conflict
Colonialism
Colonization
Commodity
Dystopia
Employment
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eq_isMigrated=2
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eq_society-politics
Exclusion
Farm Security Administration
Frank Norris
Historiography
Ideology
Immigration
Immigration law
Imperialism
Industrial Workers of the World
Internment
Internment of Japanese Americans
Jack London
Japanese Americans
John Steinbeck
Journalism
Literature
Model minority
Modernity
Monopoly Capital
Narrative
National security
Nationality
Nativism (politics)
Nisei
Open Door Policy
Orientalism
Pearl S. Buck
Peasant
Persecution
Political economy
Politics
Populism
Prejudice
Progressivism
Publication
Racialization
Racism
Radicalism (historical)
Rhetoric
Slavery
Standard of living
Subversion
Superiority (short story)
The Iron Heel
The Other Hand
United States
Vegetable
Wang Lung
World War II
Writing
Yellow Peril
Product details
- ISBN 9780691114194
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 14 Nov 2004
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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".
