ABOUT THIS BOOK

Between 1919-1938, contact between Asia and America forced a reassessment of the normative boundaries of race, sex, gender, class, home, and nation. Karen Kuo’s provocative East Is West and West Is East looks closely at these global shifts to modernity.

In her analysis of five forgotten texts—the 1930 film East Is West, Frank Capra’s 1937 version of Lost Horizon and its 1973 remake, Younghill Kang's novel East Goes West, and Baroness Ishimoto’s memoir/manifesto, Facing Both Ways—Kuo elucidates how “Asia” played a role in shaping American gender and racial identities and how Asian authors understood modern America and its social, political, and cultural influence on Asia.

Kuo asserts that while notions of white and Asian racial difference remain salient, sexual and gendered constructions of Asians and whites were at times about similarity and intersections as much as they were about establishing differences.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Karen Kuo is an Assistant Professor of Asian Pacific American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction
1 How Yellow and White Women Are Sold: Controlling Chinese and White Female Sexuality and the Making of US Domesticity in East Is West
2 Masculine Racial Formations in Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee
3 Utopias Lost and Found: Lost Horizon and the Revitalization of American Masculinity
4 Envisioning Feminism across the Pacific: Japanese and American Feminism and the Limits of Race in Facing Two Ways

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

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