This chapter reconsiders modernism as a cultural movement from below generated by the rise of a new left-wing, working-class, and radical gathering of writers inspired by world events from the Russian Revolution to the surge of trade unionism. The chapter puts into conversation scholarship on radical American writing with writings on African American and feminist modernisms. The chapter considers what was unique about the form and content of modernist experiment by writers with openly progressive and radical political commitments.

This chapter contextualizes the career of the maverick, proletarian, Chinese American writer H. T. Tsiang – both the contrarian, “floating” sensibility that led him to self-publish his work in the 1930s and 1940s, challenging the China-watching mainstream which constellated around the bestselling author Pearl Buck, as well as the renewed interest in his work decades later, when it was recast as performing a kind of avant-garde negation. Tsiang’s career offers a model for thinking about rivalry and failure, the latter-day romance of lost causes, as well as the lineages drawn upon to sustain the aspirational scope of Asian American studies.