This chapter examines how cheap, handy, and accessible print formats facilitated the growth and development of American genre writing throughout the twentieth century. From horror stories to science fiction, popular genres took root in pulpwood magazines targeting working-class male readers who lived in industrialized areas. Paperback books became the primary format by which genre writing was marketed to a mass readership. Whether in magazine or book form, the appeal of pulp fiction may be attributed to the serial plots and sensationalized storytelling that came along with ephemeral print media. But it also may be attributed to their masculinist perspectives and racial and ethnic stereotyping narrative strategies that reinforced the prejudices of its presumed readership of white men. The chapter tracks the representation of anti-Asian and anti-Black sentiment in pulp fiction from the early twentieth century to the Black Power era. It explains how such sentiment reflected nativist and imperialist ideologies of difference, and it ends with a consideration of how writers of color have sought to diversify popular genres by writing against the pulp traditions they have inherited.

While the stereotype of the oriental villain and the practice of yellowface have been discussed by scholars, less has been said about how practices of cinematography and editing more subtly controlled the representation of Asian immigrants in American film. This chapter examines how orientalism informed American feature-length silent films, including Chinatown Nights (1929) and A Tale of Two Worlds (1921), by visualizing the negative impact of Chinese immigration, depicting the investigation of Chinatown’s people and spaces by white American heroes, and concluding with the reassertion of occidental dominance over oriental people and spaces. In contrast, films such as The Tong-Man (1919) presented resistance to cinematic regulatory gazes by casting Asian American actors in key roles, including silent film’s only Asian American star, Sessue Hayakawa, to challenge those orientalist constructions of subjectivity and objectivity. This chapter demonstrates that, while many silent films depicted Chinatown as a space for white American adventure and Chinese immorality, some demonstrated an appreciation for Chinese immigrants who desired the American dream and assimilation in America’s melting pot.

This chapter considers how literary representations of interracial relationships between Asians and other US racial groups underwent a major transition in the 1920s, in response to shifting geopolitics in Asia. In Mae Munro Watkins Franking’s My Chinese Marriage (1921) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928), miscegenation plots serve to expand the possibilities for transnational alliances and to register American anxieties about social upheaval in Asia. Franking’s memoir provides an intimate look at the romance between a white American woman and a Chinese man in the USA and in China. Du Bois’s Dark Princess highlights the international revolutionary potential represented by the union of an African American man and an Asian Indian woman. These plots reject a binary choice between American or Asian identities. And yet, despite their progressive or revisionist energies, these works reveal a reliance on patriarchal, reproductive models of gender and sexuality and an erotic excess that serves both as justification for miscegenation and as fodder for critics. This chapter argues that these early twentieth-century discourses of reproductive heterosexuality and transnational, coalitional politics should be understood as an example of what Colleen Lye refers to as a distinctive Asian American “racial form.”