Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network

Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network invigorates the burgeoning study of early Asian American literature in the pre–civil rights era with its dazzling conceptualization of a transpacific community among American and Chinese writers and musicians during the interwar years. Focusing on the United States during the 1930s and early 1940s, Richard Jean So brilliantly uncovers the personal, professional, and artistic relationships and collaborations among well-known figures such as Pearl Buck, Paul Robeson, and Lin Yutang as well as less-studied writers such as Agnes Smedley and Lao She. During the 1930s these writers and artists together contributed to a working-class, popular-front culture, which, as Michael Denning so persuasively claims, was promulgated by communists, socialists, and leftist fellow travelers alike; So goes even further than Denning, however, to argue that Smedley, Buck, Robeson, Lin, and Lao She distinctly articulated a common structure of feeling that...