Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African American and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937. Julia H.Lee. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

Abstract

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African American and Asian American Literatures/1896-1937 Julia H. Lee. New York: New York University Press, 2011.How do you identify yourself as American in a period that enacts exclusion acts that deny you access to full citizenship? What is your status as a racialized being when the foundational narrative of your nation is roiled with anxieties surrounding racial difference? What are some strategies that racial minorities might deploy in negotiating and securing a space inside what historically has been a markedly protean and exclusionary national identity? Moreover, how are these themes explored and reproduced in the literature of the period in which they occur? These are only some of the fascinating questions that Julia Lee explores in Interradal Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African American and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937.In her book, Lee notes that at the beginning of the twentieth century, pairings of blacks and Asians were pervasive and frequently deployed, in a wide variety of discourses, to accommodate an evolving narrative on race and national identity. The use of Asian characters in African American novels in this period, like the use of black characters in Asian novels, were natural outgrowths of this practice. The authors of the texts cited in Lee's study used these pairings to generate narratives that were rich and divergent not only in the ways they engaged the question of racial identity but also in the ways in which they explored political alliances across racial divides. Lee notes that, because of the pervasiveness of these pairings of blacks and Asians in cultural texts from fields as widely divergent as history, the law, and science, identity for each group was deeply imbricated in comprehending the other. Because the popular discourse of the day linked them, both blacks and Asians had to take into account the other when conceptualizing their respective communities.Lee focuses her primary attention on seven works from the period 1896-1937. As she makes clear, each of these texts, in interrogating questions of race and exclusion, simultaneously performs other important cultural work. Some of these texts, like Charles Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition, drew on actual historical events. In Marrow, Chesnutt not only reenacts the event that led to the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson-the denial of access to a white car by a black passenger-he also adds a twist by introducing a Chinese laborer into the equation. …