East Is West and West Is East

Karen Kuo is an Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University.

"Kuo's book is a distinctive and important contribution to Asian diaspora and Asian American cultural studies focusing on the first half of the twentieth century. Her analysis of historical figures and filmic and literary texts deepens the increasing transnational focus in Asian American studies and also overcomes some of the limitations of US-centered scholarship. At the same time, Kuo embeds her interpretations of iconic Japanese feminists and classic Asian American texts within American cultural, historical, and political contexts, illustrating the complex inter- and intranational discursive hegemony of that period." - MELUS, September 2nd 2013 "East Is West and West Is East is ostensibly about gender and race issues in the interwar period, but the intrigue of the book is Karen Kuo's insights into the development of American modernity. She argues persuasively that the United States used Asia as a 'proxy' for American crises of modernity by limiting Asians' ability to integrate into American society... [I]t provides enough to allow scholars to uncover new ways of thinking about American modernity. She takes a sophisticated approach by studying females and males and by looking at the views and interactions of Asians and Americans... Innovative." - Journal of American History "Within American studies and its various branches, much of the scholarship about sexual and other kinds of interracial encounters focuses on white American anxiety. Karen Kuo broadens our purview considerably. Her wonderfully astute study finds that even during the period when the United States prohibited Asian immigration, there were literary and filmic texts by and in which white and Asian Americans anticipated greater freedoms through intimate relationships across historical racial boundaries... With scholarship like Kuo's, Asian American studies continues to broaden the field of Americanist inquiry. Kuo's focus on the ways in which the United States and Asia used each other as mirrors takes an important step." - Journal of Asian American Studies "[Kuo] provides an analysis of the complex transnational dynamics of gender, race, class, and sexuality in literature and film... [I]t is her illumination of these unresolved tensions and their importance that make this book a compelling piece of scholarship." - Pacific Historical Review, Feburary 2014

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1 How Yellow and White Women Are Sold: Controlling Chinese and White Female Sexuality and the Making of US Domesticity in East Is West 2 Masculine Racial Formations in Younghill Kang's East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee 3 Utopias Lost and Found: Lost Horizon and the Revitalization of American Masculinity 4 Envisioning Feminism across the Pacific: Japanese and American Feminism and the Limits of Race in Facing Two Ways Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index