Chapter 1 - The Popular Front and Asiatic Modes of Cultural Production

Summary

This chapter connects Asian American literature to the revolutionary cultural and political networks associated with the Popular Front and Soviet Union of the interwar years. The chapter begins by noting the relative absence of Asian Americans from these networks through a discussion of Carlos Bulosan, whose writings were forced to navigate constraining Popular Front representations of Asia and Asians. The chapter then turns to the author and actor H. T. Tsiang, whose combinations of realism and exoticism are shown to echo both Soviet socialist realism and Karl Marx’s notion of the “Asiatic Mode of Production.” The latter emerges as a tool used by Tsiang to nuance Marxist revolution: to think beyond the linear revolutionary scheme disastrously applied to China by the Soviet-led Comintern; and beyond the limits of Popular Front literary norms. The result is a flexible, inclusive vision of the interwar international left, one attendant to vernacular histories and traditions.