Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


Dissertation (Final).pdf (1004.11 KB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Asian American Radical Literature: Marxism, Revolution, and the Politics of Form

Freeman, Bradley M
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405525061

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
My dissertation argues that Asian American writing between 1930 and 1970 contains a trenchant but overlooked tradition of radical political critique. The left-leaning Asian American writers whom I examine—Chinese American H.T. Tsiang, Filipino American Carlos Bulosan, and Japanese Americans Ayako Ishigaki and Milton Murayama—contest both economic inequalities in the U.S. and the racist, exclusionist sentiments of white working-class culture. From the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, exclusionary immigration policies nearly ended Asian immigration to the U.S. altogether. Consequently, anti-Asian racism prompted many upper-class Asian American writers, whom the critic Elaine Kim calls “ambassadors of goodwill,” to author narratives that translate traditional Asian culture for American readers, making it compatible with and congenial to American culture and values. In contrast, the texts I examine utilize Marxist critique to expose the racial divides that fracture the working class and oppress immigrant workers especially. By showing how these narratives incorporate Marxist frameworks, I build on recent scholarship on race, the proletarian novel, and the Communist left. If the proletarian genre hinges on working-class protagonists and protest, these writers differ from novelists like James T. Farrell and John Steinbeck who limit their vision of protest and revolution to the white working class. Ultimately, the first three chapters of my dissertation reveal how Tsiang, Bulosan, and Ishigaki imagine an international working class bent on a revolutionary end to both economic and racial oppression. My final chapter identifies a literary-historical shift in Murayama’s later proletarian novel, which no longer foresees revolutionary change as a legitimate possibility in the midst of the Cold War’s political gridlock. My project, then, argues for the prominence of radical political critique early on in Asian American literary history and shows the way in which this critique eventually gets folded into the well-known activist formations and literary traditions of the 1970s.
Martin Joseph Ponce (Advisor)
272 p.
American Literature; Asian American Studies; Ethnic Studies
Asian American Studies; Marxism; Transnational; Ethnic Studies; Early Asian American Literature

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Freeman, B. M. (2014). Asian American Radical Literature: Marxism, Revolution, and the Politics of Form [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405525061

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Freeman, Bradley. Asian American Radical Literature: Marxism, Revolution, and the Politics of Form . 2014. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405525061.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Freeman, Bradley. "Asian American Radical Literature: Marxism, Revolution, and the Politics of Form ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1405525061

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1405525061
1,494
© 2014, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.