Modernism the Orient edited by Zhaoming Qian University of New Orleans Press, 2012. 298 pages Nearly ten years ago, in the introduction to his seminal study Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel, Eric Hayot noted--with some skepticism--the ongoing, institutional success of East/West comparativism in literary studies. had become its own cottage industry, Hayot observed, enjoying something of a market showing no signs of abating (2). But he also wondered, Is there more to say about Pound China? In the pages that followed, Hayot provided his own unique contribution to the discourse, thereby insisting, at least for the moment, that there was indeed still more to say. But if has become its own niche market, the more capacious field of transpacific modernism--what we might call the Era the Orient--has become even more rich fluid. Recent contributions such as Pacific Rim Modernisms (edited by Mary Gillies, Helen Sword, Steven Yao); Hayot's own second book, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, Chinese Pam; Josephine Park's Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form Asian American Poetics; Jonathan Stalling's Poetics of Emptiness: Transformations of Asian Thought in American Poetry; Christopher Bush's Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media--among many more new interesting studies--show that Hayot's bull market has only accelerated over the last ten years. For all the ups downs of what has now become known as the transnational turn in literary studies, there is much to admire in the ongoing strength of its transpacific wing. The potential danger of such a large productive discourse, however, is that paradigms can become entrenched, sources key terms can go unquestioned, traditional accounts can become self-evident axiomatic--in short, scholars can begin repeating themselves, or, just as depressingly, can simply go on mopping up any last citational scrap lingering on the archival floor. It can be useful on occasion, then, to take the temperature of the discourse, determine whether we've begun to come down with some of these common scholarly ailments, or whether there is a healthy environment of scholarly debate important questions. The recent publication of Modernism the Orient, edited by Zhaoming Qian, including, as it does, a wide selection of international scholarship reflecting the proceedings of a conference held in Hangzhou, China in 2010, offers precisely this opportunity for gauging the health of contemporary transpacific modernist studies, or at the very least a representative glimpse of these ongoing conversations. As such, the title of Qian's edited volume is already worrisome. Modernism the Orient? How many books with variations on this title can there be? One need only remember Qian's own earlier volume, Orientalism Modernism, or Robert Kern's Orientalism, Modernism, the American Poem, or Gao Fen's Modernism Oriental Culture, to say nothing of the slew of transpacific and books treating specific authors in this regard, including yet another Zhaoming Qian volume, Ezra Pound China, Sanehide Kodama's Ezra Pound Japan, Ming Xie's Ezra Pound the Appropriation of Chinese Poetry--one could go on on. Of course, we should perhaps be careful here not to dwell too much on the book's generic title (and even its somewhat bizarre cover art with its pink-and-teal map of the world--the world, mind you), since it is, after all, the published proceedings of an international conference designed to bring together a wide range of scholars operating under these umbrella topics. What then of the various contributions to the volume? On this score, Modernism the Orient can be--depending on the individual contribution--as tedious unpersuasive as it can exciting groundbreaking. It is perhaps, in this sense, a fair representation of the many levels of scholarship that scholars tend to bring to any given academic conference. …