Introduction

Summary

The period from 1930 to 1965 marks a span of dramatic transformation within the United States, from the Great Depression to the new social movements of the 1960s. For Asian American history, the start of this period is deeply marked by Asian exclusion, formalized in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act, and, by its end, the emergence of today’s Asian America, remade after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the legislative culmination of multiple efforts to repeal exclusion. On the global stage, these years witnessed dispersed shifts of power that literally remapped the decolonizing world: from the decline of territorial colonialism in the 1930s to the rise of third-world liberation in the 1960s. And in the middle of this period, World War II erupted, sharpening political alignments that would be hastily redrawn in the about-face of the Cold War, which ignited hotspots in Asia after World War II. This volume seeks to draw out the national and global dimensions of the literary output in this period of transitions, realignments, remappings, and remakings.