America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945

What explains the perception of Asians both as economic exemplars and as threats? America's Asia explores a discursive tradition that affiliates the East with modern efficiency, in contrast to more familiar primitivist forms of Orientalism. Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a "model minority" or a "yellow peril"—two aspects of what she calls "Asiatic racial form"— to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when indust...