33 - Transpacific Modernism

Summary

This chapter returns to American fascination with the Orient in the modernist era to consider the work of Asian writers in the US in a period of rising nativism and hardening policies of exclusion. The modernist aesthete and the modern liberal mark out defining poles for the reception of literary works by Asians in this period, and my discussion is structured around the influence of the high modernist orientalism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the work of Sadakichi Hartmann and Yone Noguchi, the strictures of Pearl Buck’s interwar humanitarianism for the work of Lin Yutang and H. T. Tsiang, and finally a pair of writers unfettered by prevailing Orientalist modes, Carlos Bulosan and José Garcia Villa. All of these writers present transpacific imaginations unconstrained by their constituting bonds: they fashioned new selves, pitched anti-imperialist philosophies, and produced electrifying art.