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In the Cold War era, Chinese Americans were caught in a double-bind. The widespread stigma of illegal immigration, as it was often called, was most easily countered with the model minority, assimilating and forming nuclear families, but that in turn led to further stereotypes. In Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities, Heidi Kim investigates how Chinese American writers navigated a strategy to normalize and justify the Chinese presence during a time when fears of Communism ran high.

Kim explores how writers like Maxine Hong Kingston, Jade Snow Wong, and C. Y. Lee, among others, addressed issues of history, family, blood purity, and law through then-groundbreaking novels and memoirs. Illegal Immigrants/Model Minorities also uses legal cases, immigration documents, and law as well as mass media coverage to illustrate how writers constructed stories in relation to the political structures that allowed or disallowed their presence, their citizenship, and their blended identity. 

Kim illuminates the rapidly shifting political and social pressures on Chinese American authors who selectively concealed, revealed, and reconstructed issues of citizenship, belonging, and inclusion in their writing.

A century ago, activists confronting racism and colonialism—in India, South Africa, and Black America—used print media to connect with one another. Then, as now, the most effective medium for their undertakings was the English language. Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone tells the story of this interconnected Anglophone world. Through Rabindranath Tagore’s writings on China, Mahatma Gandhi’s recollections of South Africa, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s invocations of India, Madhumita Lahiri theorizes print internationalism. This methodology requires new terms within the worldwide hegemony of the English language (“the global Anglophone”) in order to encourage alternate geographies (such as the Global South) and new collectivities (such as people of color).

The women of print internationalism feature prominently in this account. Sonja Schlesin, born in Moscow, worked with Indians in South Africa. Sister Nivedita, an Irish woman in India, collaborated with a Japanese historian. Jessie Redmon Fauset, an African American, brought the world home to young readers through her work as an author and editor.

Reading across races and regions, genres and genders, Imperfect Solidarities demonstrates the utility of the neologism for postcolonial literary studies.

In Search of Admiration and Respect examines the institutionalization of Chinese cultural diplomacy in the period between high imperialism and the international ascendance of the People’s Republic of China. During these years, Chinese intellectuals and officials tried to promote the idea of China’s cultural refinement in an effort to combat negative perceptions of the nation. Yanqiu Zheng argues that, unlike similar projects by more established powers, Chinese cultural diplomacy in this era was not carried out solely by a functional government agency; rather, limited resources forced an uneasy collaboration between the New York-based China Institute and the Chinese Nationalist government. 

In Search of Admiration and Respect uses the Chinese case to underscore what Zheng calls “infrastructure of persuasion,” in which American philanthropy, museums, exhibitions, and show business had disproportionate power in setting the agenda of unequal intercultural encounters. This volume also provides historical insights into China’s ongoing quest for international recognition. Drawing upon diverse archival sources, Zheng expands the contours of cultural diplomacy beyond established powers and sheds light on the limited agency of peripheral nations in their self-representation.

In a world where writing by hand is disappearing, Laura Vermeeren studies why calligraphy in China is not just surviving, but evolving in surprising ways.

As handwriting fades in the digital age, calligraphy in China is caught between tradition and reinvention. Ink Studies deconstructs this paradox, determining how calligraphy is not simply an ancient art form, but more so a site of ongoing cultural negotiation. Laura Vermeeren investigates how calligraphy moves through five distinct visual and social fields, shaping and being shaped by its practitioners. While often framed as an act of repetition and tied to centuries of disciplined copying, calligraphy also emerges here as a force of creativity—one that is actively mobilized in contemporary China, whether through state-sponsored initiatives or the aesthetics of modern design.

Uniting contemporary art and media history, Ink Studies provides vital perspectives on how China’s past is continually reimagined in the present, portraying calligraphy’s enduring relevance in an era of rapid technological change.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Chinese opera theater arrived as one of the significant performing art forms in California. Nancy Yunhwa Rao excavates and contextualizes the important history of Chinese Opera Theater, bringing to light the ways it became woven into the financial, political, social, and family life in California and beyond.

Chinese opera theater found brick-and-mortar homes with San Francisco theaters like the Hing Chuen Yuen and the Donn Qui Yuen. But troupes had already followed Chinese immigrants to mining and railroad towns, and across the American West. As Chinese theater became part of California and San Francisco culture, popular Chinese actors advocated for their art alongside appeals for civil rights. Rao draws on personal diaries, newspapers and artifacts to place Chinese theater within the everyday lives of San Francisco. She also examines the costumes, singing, staging, and storytelling that impacted mainstream reception and influenced how Chinese communities saw themselves.

Illustrated with seventy photographs, Inside Chinese Theater is an expert and eloquent journey into the early decades of Chinese opera in America.

Intimate Positions offers the first sustained study of Sino-Italian writing, foregrounding the ways in which cultural belonging is imagined through love. Beginning from the premise that intimacy is never merely private, the book examines literary works written in both Chinese and Italian by authors of Chinese origin living in Italy, showing how romantic and familial attachments become charged sites where wider social and political questions take shape. In dialogue with affect theory, Intimate Positions approaches intimacy as both a literary theme and a force that binds individuals to families, communities, nations, and inherited ideas of identity.

Across five chapters, Intimate Positions traces a movement from normative attachments towards increasingly unstable and transformative forms of belonging. Chapters examine works in which romantic intimacy reinforces collective and patriotic visions of Chineseness; working-class narratives in which precarious lives and fragile solidarities fracture the image of a unified Chinese community in Italy; family and marriage in writing by first- and second-generation authors; interracial relationships as unsettled spaces shaped by gendered power, desire, and inequality; and queer forms of self-representation, in which Chineseness and Italianness emerge as fluid positions that can be performed and remade.

At once an interdisciplinary contribution to Sinophone studies, Italian studies, cultural studies, and mobility studies, Intimate Positions combines close textual analysis with interviews with writers, artists, activists, and cultural mediators. It illuminates a field underexplored by scholarship, and offers a relational understanding of belonging as an ongoing process of affective positioning, continually made and remade through intimacy.