The Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II, and Asian American Antifascism

Abstract

For most of the Asian and Asian American writers published in the United States from 1937–1946, “fascism” was the most salient, global state of emergency, not the Japanese American incarceration. H. T. Tsiang, Ayako Ishigaki, and Carlos Bulosan had deep ties to the political left, and they used antifascism—a dominant rubric of the political left at the time—to connect the authoritarian nature of Imperial Japan to the violent nature of the racism they encountered in the United States. By simultaneously accessing the Second Sino-Japanese War, their lived experiences in the United States, and the contradictions of US global power, they labored to overcome the split across Asian American communities produced by US foreign policy and Japanese militarism. By placing the work of Asian and Asian American writers within wider discourses of fascism and empire in the period, one sees the valence of antifascism as a vehicle of solidarity within their transnational politics, as well as the stakes of resituating that rubric into Asian American critique.