‘Pan-Asianism’ came to prominence after the Second World War. Beyond the conventional understanding of the link between pan-Asianism and Japanese imperialism since then, this chapter explains the role of pan-Asianism as an anti-imperial ideology and strategy in the early twentieth century. As an anti-imperial ideology, pan-Asianism advanced a normative argument for the emancipation of Asia from Western imperialism and provided an alternative to Eurocentric discourse on civilisation, a vision premised upon a shared Asian spirituality, heritage, culture and glorious past. As an anti-imperial strategy, pan-Asianism offered Indian nationalist leaders in exile a language to gain support of the Japanese and the Chinese for their nationalist movement against British rule. Although pan-Asianism later came to be used as a justification in Japanese imperialism, it is important to highlight the anti-imperial role that pan-Asianism played in the early twentieth century. This chapter does so by analysing the works of leading Pan-Asianist ideologues and activists of the period and by highlighting the ideological and strategic aspects of their conception of pan-Asianism as anti-imperialism.

The goal of this chapter is to introduce anti-Asian racism and the COVID-19 pandemic. It begins with the story of Kristina Arevalo, an Asian American scholar pursuing a PhD in developmental psychology in New York City who experienced racial discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is consistent with the history of racial scapegoating in the US, a strategy of blaming Asian Americans for health and economic crises, as well as wars, that relies on fear and hate to justify violence against them. This chapter is informed by Asian critical race theory (AsianCrit), discusses who are Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders, some popular myths about them, and their place in a racial position model. It examines how anti-Asian racism is supported by the model minority myth, the Yellow Peril racist trope, the perpetual foreigner stereotype, and Orientalism. The chapter includes a Food for Thought section on the Delano grape strike and linked fate. It ends with a discussion of Kristina Arevalo and rethinking who is considered a “Real American.”

This chapter examines how cheap, handy, and accessible print formats facilitated the growth and development of American genre writing throughout the twentieth century. From horror stories to science fiction, popular genres took root in pulpwood magazines targeting working-class male readers who lived in industrialized areas. Paperback books became the primary format by which genre writing was marketed to a mass readership. Whether in magazine or book form, the appeal of pulp fiction may be attributed to the serial plots and sensationalized storytelling that came along with ephemeral print media. But it also may be attributed to their masculinist perspectives and racial and ethnic stereotyping narrative strategies that reinforced the prejudices of its presumed readership of white men. The chapter tracks the representation of anti-Asian and anti-Black sentiment in pulp fiction from the early twentieth century to the Black Power era. It explains how such sentiment reflected nativist and imperialist ideologies of difference, and it ends with a consideration of how writers of color have sought to diversify popular genres by writing against the pulp traditions they have inherited.

While the stereotype of the oriental villain and the practice of yellowface have been discussed by scholars, less has been said about how practices of cinematography and editing more subtly controlled the representation of Asian immigrants in American film. This chapter examines how orientalism informed American feature-length silent films, including Chinatown Nights (1929) and A Tale of Two Worlds (1921), by visualizing the negative impact of Chinese immigration, depicting the investigation of Chinatown’s people and spaces by white American heroes, and concluding with the reassertion of occidental dominance over oriental people and spaces. In contrast, films such as The Tong-Man (1919) presented resistance to cinematic regulatory gazes by casting Asian American actors in key roles, including silent film’s only Asian American star, Sessue Hayakawa, to challenge those orientalist constructions of subjectivity and objectivity. This chapter demonstrates that, while many silent films depicted Chinatown as a space for white American adventure and Chinese immorality, some demonstrated an appreciation for Chinese immigrants who desired the American dream and assimilation in America’s melting pot.

This chapter considers how literary representations of interracial relationships between Asians and other US racial groups underwent a major transition in the 1920s, in response to shifting geopolitics in Asia. In Mae Munro Watkins Franking’s My Chinese Marriage (1921) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess (1928), miscegenation plots serve to expand the possibilities for transnational alliances and to register American anxieties about social upheaval in Asia. Franking’s memoir provides an intimate look at the romance between a white American woman and a Chinese man in the USA and in China. Du Bois’s Dark Princess highlights the international revolutionary potential represented by the union of an African American man and an Asian Indian woman. These plots reject a binary choice between American or Asian identities. And yet, despite their progressive or revisionist energies, these works reveal a reliance on patriarchal, reproductive models of gender and sexuality and an erotic excess that serves both as justification for miscegenation and as fodder for critics. This chapter argues that these early twentieth-century discourses of reproductive heterosexuality and transnational, coalitional politics should be understood as an example of what Colleen Lye refers to as a distinctive Asian American “racial form.”