The transnational paradigm is at least thirty years old, and there are signs it is under considerable pressure for major revision or even replacement by other, more precise theories. These two books offer significant challenges to literary transnationalism. However, each reaches a significantly different conclusion about the value and possible future of transnational cultural analyses. Although each book represents a different historical period, both focus on relatively underrepresented transnational literary relations. Nan Z. Da treats Sino-US literary exchanges between 1800 and 1910. Vince Schleitwiler focuses on Filipino, Filipino American, African American, and Japanese American cultural works from the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) to the mid-1980s. Both authors contribute to recent scholarship on theories of the transpacific region. Da considers the literary effects of the nineteenth-century economic, social, and political exchanges between the United States and China across the Pacific, especially as the Qing dynasty and the US nation faced domestic conflicts....
Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange
Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific: Imperialism’s Racial Justice and Its Fugitives
John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities and professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California, where he is chair of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. He is the author of nine books, editor or coeditor of eleven books, and has published more than two hundred scholarly essays and reviews. His current book project is “Sailing Lessons: Writing across the Pacific.”
John Carlos Rowe; Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange
Strange Fruit of the Black Pacific: Imperialism’s Racial Justice and Its Fugitives. American Literature 1 March 2021; 93 (1): 145–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8878554
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