Lucy Z. Fang

This project recovers and translates early-20th-century Chinese American literary production, before it knew itself as “Chinese American,” shored up by a transpacific history of China-US political, economic, and cultural entanglements. Through multilingual archives of print matter published in the United States, the project tracks the flourishing and assimilation of the Chinese novel form into the American literary and publication landscape. As historiography, this research shows how domestic race and class relations are refracted through the transpacific, in which writers of an aspirational intellectual class—as mediators between Western modernity and a diasporic Chinese working class—rethink the figure of the Chinese “coolie,” which has permeated contemporary Asian American cultural politics and intellectual projects.