2013 Honorable Mention, Asian American Studies Association's
prize in Literary Studies Part of the American Literatures Initiative
Series Interracial Encounters attempts to answer this rather
straightforward literary question, arguing that scenes depicting
Black-Asian interactions, relationships, and conflicts capture the
constitution of African American and Asian American identities as each
group struggled to negotiate the racially exclusionary nature of
American identity.
In this nuanced study, Julia H. Lee argues that the diversity and
ambiguity that characterize these textual moments radically undermine
the popular notion that the history of Afro-Asian relations can be
reduced to a monolithic, media-friendly narrative, whether of
cooperation or antagonism. Drawing on works by Charles Chesnutt, Wu
Tingfang, Edith and Winnifred Eaton, Nella Larsen, W.E.B. Du Bois, and
Younghill Kang, Interracial Encounters foregrounds how these reciprocal
representations emerged from the nation's pervasive pairing of the
figure of the "Negro" and the "Asiatic" in oppositional, overlapping, or
analogous relationships within a wide variety of popular, scientific,
legal, and cultural discourses. Historicizing these interracial
encounters within a national and global context highlights how multiple
racial groups shaped the narrative of race and national identity in the
early twentieth century, as well as how early twentieth century American
literature emerged from that multiracial political context.
