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: Hart Crane and transnational periodicals

Visionary Company: Hart Crane and Modernist Periodicals

BY FRANCESCA BRATTON

Edinburgh UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781474481519

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-visionary-company.html

This book examines the poetry of Hart Crane and his circle within transnational modernist periodical culture. It reappraises Crane’s poetry and reception and introduces several lost works by the poet, including critical prose, reviews and ‘Nopal’, a poem written in Mexico. Through its exploration of Crane’s close engagement with periodical culture, it provides a rich and detailed panorama of twentieth-century literary and artistic communities. In particular, this monograph offers a vivid portrait of forgotten periodicals and their artistic communities, examines the periodical contexts in which modernist poetry fused material and aesthetic experimentation and explores Crane’s important and neglected influence on modern and contemporary poetry.

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.

• Weds textual and literary-critical approaches to Hart Crane’s poetry and his avant-garde milieu, offering a fresh reading of transnational modernism
• Offers a vivid portrait of forgotten periodicals and their artistic communities, introducing a wealth of new archival material, including previously unknown work from Crane’s last poetic project
• Explores the periodical contexts in which modernist poetry fused material and aesthetic experimentation
• Theorizes periodical publishing as poetic form and creative-critical artistic practices
• Explores Crane’s important and neglected influence on modern and contemporary poetry

Situating him deftly within different geographical contexts and cultural coteries, Bratton shows how Crane established truly transnational poetic and critical practices. Through judicious close readings and the excavation of exciting new archival material, she skilfully demonstrates Crane’s acute awareness of the publishing ecologies of modernism and the complexities of his writing and thought with which we continue to grapple. – Niall Munro, author of Hart Crane’s Queer Modernist Aesthetic

Francesca Bratton is a senior lecturer in American literature in the Department of English at Uppsala University. She has published articles and reviews in English, PN Review, Notes & Queries, and Year’s Work in English Studies. In 2013-14 she was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress.

Book News: Charting new territories in Rhys studies

Transnational Jean Rhys: Lines of Transmission, Lines of Flight

Edited by Juliana Lopoukhine, Frédéric Regard, and Kerry-Jane Wallart

Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

ISBN: 9781501371653

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/transnational-jean-rhys-9781501371653/

This volume investigates the frameworks that can be applied to reading Caribbean author Jean Rhys. While Wide Sargasso Sea famously displays overt forms of literary influences, Jean Rhys's entire oeuvre is so fraught with connections to other texts and textual practices across geographical boundaries that her classification as a cosmopolitan modernist writer is due for reassessment.

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.

Transnational Jean Rhys argues against the relative isolationism that is sometimes associated with Rhys's writing by demonstrating both how she was influenced by a wide range of foreign – especially French – authors and how her influence was in turn disseminated in myriad directions. Including an interview with Black Atlantic novelist Caryl Phillips, this collection charts new territories in the influences on/of an author known for her dislike of literary coteries, but whose literary communality has been underestimated.

Juliana Lopoukhine is senior lecturer in English studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. She has published various chapters and articles on women modernist writers (Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Rose Macaulay), a critical edition of Mrs Dalloway (2013), and co-edited three issues of L’Atelier (2016, 2019, 2020). She wrote her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Chantal Delourme and Scott McCracken and received her PhD from the Université de Paris-Nanterre, France and Keele University, UK.

Frédéric Regard is professor of 19th- and 20th-century English literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. He is the author of books on William Golding, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and 'feminine writing', as well as countless peer-reviewed articles. He also edited collections of essays on life-writing and exploration narratives. His latest work, Le Détective était une femme (2018), bears on gender issues in the genesis of the detective novel as a genre.

Kerry-Jane Wallart is professor in Black Atlantic studies at the University of Orléans, France. Her Alma Mater is the École Normale Supérieure Ulm and she has been a Procter Fellow at Princeton University. She has published over 30 book chapters and articles, co-edited an issue of Sillages Critiques (2019), an issue of Revue de Littérature Comparée (2017), a volume on Jamaica Kincaid, published by Wagadu in 2018, and edited three issues of Commonwealth Essays and Studies (2019, 2012 and 2009).