Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930: Volume 1

Description

The years between 1850 and 1930 witnessed the first large-scale migration of peoples from East Asia and South Asia to North America and the emergence of the US as an imperial power in the Pacific. This period also produced the first instances of Asian North American writing, theater, and film. This exciting collection examines how the many literary and cultural works from this period approached questions of migration, exclusion, and identity. Covering an extensive ranges of topics including anticolonialist writing, the erotics of queer modernist poetry, interracial desire, and the racial gaze in silent film, the book shows the diverse and multi-ethnic nature of literary and cultural production at a crucial period in modern formations of race as well as literary and cultural aesthetics.

Josephine Lee is a professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture. She is also the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies Julia H. Lee is associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Understanding Maxine Hong Kingston (2017) and Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations In African And Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937 (2011), which received honorable mention in literary studies from the Association for Asian American Studies.