Pacific crossings2008

Pacific Crossings: China, the United States and the Trans-Pacific Imagination , is a multidisciplinary project examining the construction of China in the American imagination during the interwar years. It begins by locating a very subtle shift in American attitudes toward China, as the aging empire was recast as a rich, unexplored mystery to Western observers. I fix on this moment in which the United States "rediscovered" China and trace its causes and cues in the middlebrow literature of Pearl S. Buck and Lin Yutang, the radically self-aware proletarian writings of H.T. Tsiang, the travel writing of John Dewey, and the journalism of Henry Luce. This back-and-forth--which was at times contentious--resulted in what I term the "transpacific imagination," a figurative space between the United...