Model modernity: The making of Asiatic racial form, 1882-1945 (John Steinbeck, Jack London, Pearl S. Buck, Frank Norris)

Model Modernity traces a genealogy of post-war Asian American character in American literature during the era of Asian exclusion (1882–1945), when the antinomies of an Asiatic racial form both exemplary of and perilous to American modernity are discoverable in the antecedent figure of the U.S.-Asian border. As a “contact zone” where West meets East, the U.S.-Asian border is inescapably embedded in the mythic discourse of the American frontier, and hence both the dizzying promise of endless expansion and ever present dangers of national proportions. The U.S.-Asian border coincides to an extent with the geographical region of the West Coast, so that in seeking to locate that border the dissertation necessarily directs our gaze to scenic depictions of “California” in the period of its systematic cultural invention. However, after the 1890s the frontier is also to be spotted elsewhere in American literature: in Jack London's Manchuria of the Russo-Japanese War, in Frank Norris's Baja Mexico, in Pearl S. Buck's Northern China, as well as in John Steinbeck's agricultural valleys and seaside ecologies of Great Depression California. To the extent that it is centrally concerned with questions of determinism, alienation and class critique, literary naturalism offers a privileged terrain where the social question of “aliens ineligible to citizenship” makes figural appearance. On the one hand, disinterred investments of Asian American history are made to alter a received understanding of what constitutes literary naturalism, and, on the other hand, the reading of literary material serves to supplement historiographical reason. Model Modernity seeks to devise a new political context for the early twentieth century American novel, to intervene in the conceptualization of racism generated by Asian American historiography, and to extend post-colonial theory to the elusive object of twentieth century U.S. globalism.