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Journal of Asian American Studies 8.2 (2005) 227-230



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America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945. By Colleen Lye. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

The June 27, 2005 issue of Time magazine featured a special report on China entitled "China's New Revolution," which attempted to unravel the "mystery" of China for U.S. readers in the context of the national fears attending the Chinese purchase of the U.S. oil company, Unocal. With its rich color photographs of contented shoppers and skylines in Shanghai, graphs illustrating the country's stellar economic growth, and a narrative of the emblematic Chinese worker, Liu Li, who wants to save money and get an education, the article depicts a nation and a people who have mastered the game of modernity, in many ways more profoundly than the United States. At the same time, however, an undertone of anxiety is registered in the coverage as well. A two-page photo shows a runway lined with fighter jets, accompanied by the sinister question, "why is Beijing engaged in a major military build–up?"; and the graphs that compare U.S. and Chinese economic growth, the former anemic and the latter robust, seem intended to provoke unease as well as admiration.

Such contemporary U.S. renderings of Asia—as a relentless economic entity that is simultaneously a "model" and a "peril"—highlight the importance of Colleen Lye's new book, America's Asia. Lye investigates the dominant U.S. representations of Asia and Asian America—as well as the material consequences of these representations—from the turn of the century up to the Second World War. She ultimately argues that the discourse of the model minority and of the yellow peril are two manifestations of essentially the same, long-standing construction: an "Asiatic racial form" that has been united under the trope of "economic efficiency." Whether it has served the purposes of Asian exclusion or Asian exaltation, the possession of "an unusual capacity for economic modernity" has underlaid most U.S. readings of Asians and Asian Americans since the late [End Page 227] 19th century; this reading, moreover, stands in contrast to primitivist types of Orientalism and to representations of other U.S. minority groups as pre-industrial Others. The title, "America's Asia," underscores the way that Lye sees her intervention in the field of Asian American studies. Taken from a 1971 collection of essays by Friedman and Selden, "America's Asia" refers to the way that American categories are used to "describe, evaluate, and direct Asian experience" (4). As such, Lye views her work as bracketing off the study of Asian American agency to "return to the study of racism and racialization's effects," a project necessary to the study of subaltern experience and subjectivity that still requires scholarly attention (4).

The history of racialization put forward by America's Asia encompasses American newspaper reportage on the Russo-Japanese war, the discourses of various turn-of-the century social movements (Progressivism, California socialism, organized labor, Populism), New Deal rhetoric attending Japanese internment, and mid-century renderings of the social relationships comprising California agriculture from across the political spectrum. Though she makes her case partially through the archival sources traditionally associated with the historian, her evidence is primarily literary. In particular, she uses the anti-monopoly fiction of Jack London, Frank Norris, and the populist Ignatius Donnelly to trace the frighteningly mechanical and "indissociably plural" contours of the coolie (55), the long-forgotten genre of Alien Land Law fiction to show the discontinuity between Asian exclusion legislation and Japanese internment, and the rural-set novels of John Steinbeck and Pearl Buck to show the gradual erosion of the American dichotomy between Asian and alien. Irregardless of where her sources locate their subjects, she is ever mindful of the ways in which Asian racial formation serves U.S. geo-political interests, thus collapsing the traditional boundaries between the international and the domestic. Her second chapter, for instance, links naturalism's construction of an obsolete Anglo-Saxon...

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