Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-23-2019
Publication Title
Oxford Research Encyclopedias: North American Literatures
Abstract
Early Chinese and Japanese American male writers between 1887 and 1938 such as Yan Phou Lee, Yung Wing, Sadakichi Hartmann, Yone Noguchi, and H. T. Tsiang accessed dominant US publishing markets and readerships by presenting themselves and their works as cultural hybrids that strategically blended enticing Eastern content and forms with familiar Western language and structures. Yan Phou Lee perpetrated cross-cultural comparisons that showed that Chinese were not unlike Europeans and Americans. Yung Wing appropriated and then transformed dominant American autobiographical narratives to recuperate Chinese character. Sadakichi Hartmann and Yone Noguchi combined poetic traditions from Japan, Europe, and America in order to define a modernism that included cosmopolitans such as themselves. And H. T. Tsiang promoted Marxist world revolution by experimenting with fusions of Eastern and Western elements with leftist ideology. Although these writers have been discounted by some critics as overly compromising in their attempts to reach Western readers, they accomplished laudable cultural work in their particular historical circumstances and provide insights into the varied and complicated negotiations of Asian American identity during the exclusion era.
Keywords
early Asian American literature, Chinese American, Japanese American, strategic hybridity, Yan Phou Lee, Yung Wing, Sadakichi Hartmann, Yone Noguchi, H. T. Tsiang
DOI
10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.909
Recommended Citation
Cheung, Floyd, "Strategic Hybridity in Early Chinese and Japanese American Literature" (2019). English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/eng_facpubs/12
Comments
Archived as published. Open access article.
Click link to see complete volume of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture
Volume Editor: Josephine Lee, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Editorial Board: Anita Mannus, Miami University; Jennifer Ann Ho, University of Colorado Boulder; Floyd Cheung, Smith College; Cathy Schlund-Vials, University of Connecticut