Julia Lee identifies temporal, spatial, and affective innovation in 21st century transpacific fiction. Locating formally innovative contemporary Asian American writing in the post-1965 contexts of migration, global economies of labor, environmental anxiety, language difference, and racialized violence, Lee shows how writers have represented new technologies of immediate communication across oceanic flows of migrants, commodities, information, and waste in disjointed, parallel, and non-sequential narrative structures. Childhood trauma lingers across time and geography in a story about a Filipino nurse by Mia Alvar, while novels by Min Jin Lee, Ruth Ozeki, and Thi Bui layer Asian and American modernities, postmodernities, and contemporary present-tenses.

Wright wrote and published poetry throughout his career, culminating in the remarkable collection of “projections in the haiku manner” which he composed in the last years of his life. This analysis contextualizes Wright’s late turn to haiku in relation to his larger body of work; his reading of scholarship on haiku and Japanese Buddhism; his involvement with the Partisan Review during the 1930s; his revisionary engagement with modernist poetry, including Ezra Pound’s haiku-inspired imagism as well as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; and his affirmation of Emersonian pragmatism. I conclude by exploring the transmission of Wright’s legacy to contemporary African American poets such as Sonia Sanchez, whose liberating experiments with haiku have resulted in new expressive possibilities.

Transpacific Ecological Imagination: Envisioning the Anthropocene in Ecocritical Asian North American Literature

Widely regarded as one of the earliest examples of Asian American literature, Younghill Kang’s 1937 novel East Goes West wields many of the signifiers of the immigrant novel, including an incisive critique of American racism and capitalism. However, East Goes West is only a part of his body of work, the majority of which goes ignored by Asian American scholarship. It is an understandable neglect, for Kang’s biography and writing resists conforming to the neat contours of existing paradigms. In one period, he traveled among New York’s literati as a writer, genial native informant, and advocate for Korean liberation from Japanese colonialism, and in another period toiled in obscurity as a journeyman intellectual. Yet even as he did so, glimpses of his ambivalence – veiled criticism of the US literary scene, open admiration of Japanese poetry, and increasing alarm regarding the US empire – complicate the narrative. This chapter frames the entirety of Kang’s work and life through a transpacific lens to fully comprehend his multivalent writerly projects.

This chapter examines Asian-Latin American (literary) studies, as both a methodology and dynamic cultural production, first by tracing its precarious relation to established academic disciplines (area studies, ethnic studies, literary studies), and second by analyzing the literature of two Peruvian writers of Asian descent - Doris Moromisato and Siu Kam Wen - the former a queer poet of Okinawan descent and the latter a first-generation Chinese immigrant writer. I focus on Doris Moromisato’s literary texts that explore the figure of the dekasegi - the Latin Americans of Japanese descent who work in Japan as migrant workers - and Siu Kam Wen’s novel Viaje a ĺtaca that highlights the centrality of the Chinese coolie in Latin American history. The racialized and gendered figures of both the coolie and the dekasegi embody the complex intersections between race-class-gender-sexuality and labor in global capitalism, thereby calling into question dominant notions of nation, subjectivity, and migration. Furthermore, by troubling the boundaries of epistemological frameworks and working against the grammar of US exceptionalism, I contend that Asian-Latin American studies engages in an “Asian Americanist critique” that draws on alternative narratives and critical histories to envision counterhegemonic subjectivities and undermined global connectivities.

In 1899, W. E. B. Du Bois identified the rise of imperial Japan and the US colonization of the Philippines as world-historical events heralding a century defined by “the problem of the color line.” This chapter takes stock of his prophecy’s first decade, mapping the scope of a Black transpacific culture that restructured the collective imagination of African Americans’ dynamic position in a modernizing world. Japan and the Philippines exemplify two aspects of this Black transpacific culture: one that looked upward, envisioning a potential “champion of the darker races” emerging from Asia to challenge white supremacy, while the other looked downward, at the colonial territories and benighted wards of US expansion, whose benevolent uplift might provide new opportunities for African American imperial citizenship. Surveying material and speculative domains of geopolitics, military service, education, popular entertainment, and migration, the chapter shows how Black transpacific culture reoriented the imagination of Black belonging, worldliness, and destiny, recasting the horizons of the array of Black political and cultural modernisms that would set an Afro-Asian century in motion.

This chapter reconsiders mainstream conceptualization of reproductive freedom through examining Japanese North American writer Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998).By foregrounding historical power relations that have shaped US relations with Asia and the Pacific, Ozeki’s novel unsettles conventional tropes of reproduction and respectable domesticity. Specifically, the novel illuminates how these tropes reinforce structural inequalities obscured by the discourse of multiracial reproductive futurity and insists that the fatal consequences of US racial reproduction must be understood as a function of settler colonial capitalism that operates within the United States and beyond. Within this context, the novel maps the uneven effects of transnational settler colonial heteropatriarchal power, which entail both segregation and conflicts as well as unlikely affinities that might be transient yet persist in its emergence.