| By 1893 when Frederick Jackson Turner announced the closing of the frontier, Americans had already begun to look westward beyond the coast of California into the Pacific and to Asia in search of new frontiers. The closing of the frontier demanded exploration of new territories and racial others to be conquered. Moreover, the urgent need for new commercial markets in the 1890s to which American manufacturers could sell their surplus products to relieve the national economy of instability and depression propelled American interests in Asia-Pacific. While the United States' expansion into Asia-Pacific was clearly fueled by commercial and military interests, the region also held symbolic import for the American cultural imaginary. This study examines two turn-of-the-century American authors who made Asia-Pacific the focus of their literary production: Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, the biracial Chinese American writer who adopted a Japanese pseudonym and authored more than a dozen popular Japanese novels, and Jack London, who reinvented himself as a writer of the Pacific in the second half of his career. Watanna and London transformed Asia-Pacific into a literary region that they could package and sell to their readers through tantalizing racial romances.; While the discourse of Manifest Destiny, which informs London's and Watanna's writing, was not new to turn-of-the-century popular discourses of race, the exotic settings in Asia-Pacific to which London and Watanna transported their readers engaged readers to think about race and empire in different ways. Notably, the figure of the white father comes to be of paramount importance. Watanna's and London's writings expose as myth the paternalist rhetoric that posits the white father as benign benefactor to the "colored" races. For Watanna and London, the white father is a powerful yet problematic figure, who represents white racial purity and western political power. The white father sires white and "half-caste" children, and leaves behind a mixed legacy for his progeny, endowing his white heirs with the stolen riches of empire, and dislocation and disfranchisement for his "half-caste" children. The children of empire in London's and Watanna's writing---white, native, and racially mixed---are left alone to navigate through the complex cultural, racial and national politics engendered by American imperialism in Asia-Pacific. |
