New Books In Asian American Studies

Richard Jean So’s new book studies a group of American and Chinese writers in the three decades after WWI to propose a conceptual framework for understanding intellectual and cultural relations between China and America in the twentieth century and beyond. The period that So focuses on was crucial for a number of reasons, including a transformation in US-China relations, transformations in the world economy and international politics, the rise of a new era in media technologies (including the formation of a massive technological infrastructure between the US and East Asia, due in part to radio and telegraph technology and a transpacific transportation system) and the related emergence of a discourse of communications. In Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network (Columbia University Press, 2016), So argues that literary histories of U.S.-China cultural encounter in the twentieth century must also, in part, be histories of media. So recasts the Pacific in the twe