BOOK NEWS: Tracing the figure of the Asian girl in midcentury and postwar American fiction

Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire

By Sharon N. Tran

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

ISBN 978-1-5179-1986-3 

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517919863/asian-girlhood-in-the-shadows-of-us-empire/

Representations of the “Asian girl” as lucky objects of humanitarian rescue and rehabilitation have been used to advance America’s imperial ambitions from World War II to the wars in Korea and Viet Nam. In this compelling work, Sharon N. Tran traces the production and instrumentalization of this figure through an examination of state documents, military newspapers, documentary photographs, and other archival materials. Theorizing “Asian girlhood” as a technology of imperial power, Tran exposes how the Asian girl is invoked as a shield that protects the innocence of US empire while she is excluded from innocence herself—relegated instead to a precarious position between child and adult, human and nonhuman, plaything and laborer.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Offering fresh insight into how imperial power operates, Tran analyzes figures such as the Japanese American school-girl in the context of World War II incarceration, the elusive “camptown girl,” and the objectified image of the “Napalm Girl.” Her innovative feminist approach interrogates the tendency to reclaim innocence for the Asian girl or to reframe her as an empowered woman. She engages the work of writers and artists such as Kiku Hughes, Nora Okja Keller, Aimee Phan, and lê thi diem thúy to demonstrate how Asian American literature offers rich theoretical interventions for critiquing the child–adult dichotomy that underpins key structures of imperial domination, illuminating more capacious conceptions of girlhood.

Restoring the dignity and agency of a figure too often denied both, Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire is a groundbreaking intersectional contribution to studies of gender, race, childhood, and state power.

"Ambitious, thoroughly researched, and illuminating, Sharon N. Tran’s brilliant intervention adopts a novel feminist approach to the problematics of race and empire that lie at the heart of Asian American studies. Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire sits in the discomfiting location of the subject who’s silenced, tapping both its potential for critique as well as its capacity for imagining Asian Americanness otherwise."—Daniel Y. Kim, author of The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War

"In Asian Girlhood in the Shadows of US Empire, Sharon N. Tran perceptively demonstrates the significant appearance of the Asian girl throughout the archives of US military and imperial enterprise. By examining this figure in twentieth-century and contemporary Asian American literature and culture, Tran offers a persuasive and moving response to this history, theorizing how Asian girlhood obliges us to reckon with the past anew."—Crystal Parikh, author of Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color

Sharon N. Tran is assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Book News: The Nordic Avant Garde, 1925-50

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950

Edited by Benedikt Hjartarson, Andrea Kollnitz, Per Stounbjerg, and Tania Ørum

Brill, 2022

ISBN: 978-90-04-52011-0

https://brill.com/display/title/38041?language=en

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 is the first publication to deal with the avant-garde in the Nordic countries in this period. The essays cover a wide range of avant-garde manifestations: literature, visual arts, theatre, architecture and design, film, radio, body culture and magazines. It includes 138 color illustrations.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

It is the first major historical work to consider the Nordic avant-garde in a transnational perspective that includes all the arts and to discuss the role of the avant-garde not only within the aesthetic field but in a broader cultural and political context: the pre-war and wartime responses to international developments, the new cultural institutions, sexual politics, the impact of refugees and the new start after the war.

Of interest to teachers and students of modernism and the avant-garde, cultural studies, Scandinavian studies, art history, literature, cultural history, discourse and ideology of the interwar period.

Benedikt Hjartarson is professor of comparative literature and cultural studies at the University of Iceland. He has written and edited a number of books and articles on the European avant-garde, published in Icelandic, German, Danish, English and Swedish.

Andrea Kollnitz is associate professor of art history at Stockholm University. She has published a monograph on nationalist agendas in Swedish art criticism 1908-34 and edited a collection on Fashion and Modernism as well as published research on fashion caricatures, nationalist fashion and art discourses, the avant-garde artist’s role and artistic self-fashioning.

Per Stounbjerg is DPhil in Scandinavian literature and head of the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University. He has published on August Strindberg, genre studies, avant-garde, modernism and the aesthetics of the ugly.

Tania Ørum is professor emerita at the University of Copenhagen. She has published monographs and articles on modernism and avant-garde and is general editor of the volumes of A Cultural History of the Avant Garde in the Nordic Countries, a subseries of Avant-Garde Critical Studies (Brill | Rodopi)