America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945

America's Asia explores a discursive tradition that affiliates the East with modern efficiency, in contrast to primitivist forms of Orientalism. Colleen Lye traces the American stereotype of Asians as a "model minority" or a "yellow peril"--two aspects of what she calls "Asiatic racial form"-- to emergent responses to globalization beginning in California in the late nineteenth century, when industrialization proceeded in tandem with the nation's neocolonial expansion beyond its continental frontier.