The Asian American Avant-Garde is the first book-length study thatconceptualizes a long-neglected canon of early Asian American literature and art. Audrey Wu Clark traces a genealogy of counter-universalism in short fiction, poetry, novels, and art produced by writers and artists of Asian descent who were responding to their contemporary period of Asian exclusion in the United States, between the years 1882 and 1945.
Believing in the promise of an inclusive America, these avant-gardists critiqued racism as well as institutionalized art. Clark examines racial outsiders including Isamu Noguchi, Dong Kingman and Yun Gee to show how they engaged with modernist ideas, particularly cubism. She draws comparisons between writers such as Sui Sin Far and Carlos Bulosan with modernist luminaries like Stein, Eliot, Pound, and Proust.
Acknowledging the anachronism of the term “Asian American” with respect to these avant-gardists, Clark attempts to reco
Table of Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgmentsii INTRODUCTION1 Toward an Asian American Modernism CHAPTER ONE37 Chinatown as Universal Region in Sui Sin Far's Mrs. Spring Fragrance CHAPTER TWO96 "Little Postage Stamps of Native Soil": The Modernist Haiku during Japanese Exclusion CHAPTER THREE157 Renewing America in Dhan Gopal Mukerji's Caste and Outcast and Younghill Kang's East Goes West CHAPTER FOUR217 Popular Front Politics and Nonlinear Temporality in Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart CONCLUSION270 Asian American Universalism and the Radicalism of Performing "Assimilation" during Asian Exclusion Bibliography287
