Includes bibliographical references (pages 301-328) and index.
Contents
The minority which is not one -- A genealogy of the "yellow peril" / Jack London, George Kenna, and the Russo-Japanese war -- Meat versus rice / Frank Norris, Jack London, and the critique of monopoly capitalism -- The end of Asian exclusion? / the specter of "cheap farmers" and alien land law fiction -- A new deal for Asians / John Steinbeck, Carey McWilliams, and the liberalism of Japanese-American internment -- One world / Pearl S. Buck, Edgar Snow, and John Steinbeck on Asian American character.
Summary
What explains the perception of Asians both as economic exemplars and as threats? America's Asia explores a discursive tradition that affiliates the East with modern efficiency, in contrast to more familiar primitivist forms of Orientalism. Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a "model minority" or a "yellow peril"--Two aspects of what she calls "Asiatic racial form"--to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization proceeded in tandem with the nation's neocolonial expansion beyond its continental frontier.