Pacific crossings: China, the United States, and the transpacific imagination

Pacific Crossings: China, the United States and the Trans-Pacific Imagination, is a multidisciplinary project examining the construction of China in the American imagination during the interwar years. It begins by locating a very subtle shift in American attitudes toward China, as the aging empire was recast as a rich, unexplored mystery to Western observers. I fix on this moment in which the United States "rediscovered" China and trace its causes and cues in the middlebrow literature of Pearl S. Buck and Lin Yutang, the radically self-aware proletarian writings of H.T. Tsiang, the travel writing of John Dewey, and the journalism of Henry Luce. This back-and-forth---which was at times contentious---resulted in what I term the "transpacific imagination," a figurative space between the United States and Asia where ideas, images, and anxieties of identity, modernity, and nationhood circulated. Specifically, a re-exploration of the "China question" offers a new way of considering American anxieties toward ideas of progress and "civilization" in the 1920s and 1930s---China, representative of an older, sager, and no doubt exotic "Oriental" civilization, became the standard of measurement for a younger, rapidly modernizing United States eager to assess the global status of its ideas and culture.;A reconstruction of this circulation of ideas and anxieties holds broader implications for American literary and cultural history. To date, while a few of these figures have been studied in isolation, the phenomenon of transpacific exchange and collective imagining provides a wholly new context for understanding American culture of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the history of American relations with China. Additionally, Pacific Crossings complicates the concept of Asian American literature as a uniquely post-civil rights formation, arguing instead on behalf of a small community of writers and travelers who represented what I consider to be a nascent "Chinese American" literary identity. This loose community of writers, journalists, cosmopolitan travelers, and the merely curious bore witness to a fascinating and in some ways lost moment of internationalism; they also engaged a series of tropes and ways of describing China and Chinese Americans that endure to this day.