This critical interdisciplinary volume investigates modern and contemporary Asian cultural products in the non-westernized transpacific context of Asian and Latin American intellectual and cultural connections. It focuses on the Latin American intellectual, literary, and cultural influences on Asia, which have long been overshadowed by the dominance of Europe/North America-oriented discourse and by the predominance of academic research by both Asian and western intellectuals that focuses only on the West. Moving beyond the western intellectual paradigm, the volume examines how Asian literature, films, and art interact with Latin American literature and ideas to reexamine, reconsider, and re-explore issues related to the two regions' historical traumas, cultural identities, indigenous/vernacular traditions, and peripheral global-ness. The volume argues that Asian and Latin American literary and cultural endeavors are part of these regions' broader efforts to search for the forms of modernity that best fit their unique sociohistorical and sociocultural conditions.

This critical interdisciplinary volume investigates modern and contemporary Asian cultural products in the non-westernized transpacific context of Asian and Latin American intellectual and cultural connections. It focuses on the Latin American intellectual, literary, and cultural influences on Asia, which have long been overshadowed by the dominance of Europe/North America-oriented discourse and by the predominance of academic research by both Asian and western intellectuals that focuses only on the West. Moving beyond the western intellectual paradigm, the volume examines how Asian literature, films, and art interact with Latin American literature and ideas to reexamine, reconsider, and re-explore issues related to the two regions' historical traumas, cultural identities, indigenous/vernacular traditions, and peripheral global-ness. The volume argues that Asian and Latin American literary and cultural endeavors are part of these regions' broader efforts to search for the forms of modernity that best fit their unique sociohistorical and sociocultural conditions.

In the turbulent years after World War I, a transpacific community of American and Chinese writers and artists emerged to forge new ideas regarding aesthetics, democracy, internationalism, and the political possibilities of art. Breaking with preconceived notions of an "exotic" East, the Americans found in China and in the works of Chinese intellectuals inspiration for leftist and civil rights movements. Chinese writers and intellectuals looked to the American tradition of political democracy to inform an emerging Chinese liberalism. This interaction reflected an unprecedented integration of American and Chinese cultures and a remarkable synthesis of shared ideals and political goals. The transpacific community that came together during this time took advantage of new advances in technology and media, such as the telegraph and radio, to accelerate the exchange of ideas. It created a fast-paced, cross-cultural dialogue that transformed the terms by which the United States and China—or, more broadly, "West" and "East"—knew each other. Transpacific Community follows the left-wing journalist Agnes Smedley's campaign to free the author Ding Ling from prison; Pearl Buck's attempt to fuse Jeffersonian democracy with late Qing visions of equality in The Good Earth; Paul Robeson's collaboration with the musician Liu Liangmo, which drew on Chinese and African American traditions; and the writer Lin Yutang's attempt to create a typewriter for Chinese characters. Together, these individuals produced political projects that synthesized American and Chinese visions of equality and democracy and imagined a new course for East-West relations.

Transpacific Imaginations is a study of how American literature is enmeshed with the literatures of Asia. The book begins with Western encounters with the Pacific: Yunte Huang reads Moby Dick as a Pacific work, looks at Henry AdamsÕs not talking about his travels in Japan and the Pacific basin in his autobiography, and compares Mark Twain to Liang Qichao. Huang then turns to Asian American encounters with the Pacific, concentrating on the "Angel Island" poems and on works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Araki Yasusada. HuangÕs argument that the Pacific forms American literature more than is generally acknowledged is a major contribution to our understanding of literary history. The book is in dialogue with cross-cultural studies of the Pacific and with contemporary innovative poetics. Huang has found a vehicle to join Asians and Westerners at the deepest level, and that vehicle is poetry. Poets can best imagine an ethical ground upon which different people join hands. Huang asks us to contribute to this effort by understanding the poets and writers already in the process of linking diverse peoples.

Texts written by Southeast Asian migrants have often been read, taught, and studied under the label of multicultural literature. But what if the ideology of multiculturalism—with its emphasis on authenticity and identifiable cultural difference—is precisely what this literature resists? Transitive Cultures offers a new perspective on transpacific Anglophone literature, revealing how these chameleonic writers enact a variety of hybrid, transnational identities and intimacies. Examining literature from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, as well as from Southeast Asian migrants in Canada, Hawaii, and the U.S. mainland, this book considers how these authors use English strategically, as a means for building interethnic alliances and critiquing ruling power structures in both Southeast Asia and North America. Uncovering a wealth of texts from queer migrants, those who resist ethnic stereotypes, and those who feel few ties to their ostensible homelands, Transitive Cultures challenges conventional expectations regarding diaspora and minority writers.

Cross-cultural work combining Latin American and Japanese studies. An intellectual, artistic and social journey through Japan, Latin America and Europe, brought by experienced researchers who have conducted studies, projects and research all over the globe and have worked in multicultural and multilinguistic environments.

Cross-cultural work combining Latin American and Japanese studies. An intellectual, artistic and social journey through Japan, Latin America and Europe, brought by experienced researchers who have conducted studies, projects and research all over the globe and have worked in multicultural and multilinguistic environments.