This chapter addresses how transpacific influences shaping the genre of noir have been made into secrets. Surveying US classical film and literary noir, including Double Indemnity (1944) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947), it challenges the scholarly consensus representing noir as a cultural and intellectual collaboration between Europe and the United States. The chapter argues that eliding the history of transpacific exchanges that helped give birth to noir is itself a byproduct of US military expansion in the Asia-Pacific, a history of violence made into the verboten and unrecognizable with the aid of US popular culture. The chapter then engages with Filipino American author Carlos Bulosan’s posthumously published novel All the Conspirators, arguably the first Asian American noir novel. Written in secret to evade FBI surveillance, Bulosan’s novel went undiscovered and unpublished until the 1980s. Set in the Philippines immediately after the end of World War II, it thematizes the failures of War Crimes Tribunals to adjudicate true justice and subverts the expectations of noir to reveal hidden anticolonial solidarities, challenging US military imperialism across the Asia-Pacific.

This chapter returns to American fascination with the Orient in the modernist era to consider the work of Asian writers in the US in a period of rising nativism and hardening policies of exclusion. The modernist aesthete and the modern liberal mark out defining poles for the reception of literary works by Asians in this period, and my discussion is structured around the influence of the high modernist orientalism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the work of Sadakichi Hartmann and Yone Noguchi, the strictures of Pearl Buck’s interwar humanitarianism for the work of Lin Yutang and H. T. Tsiang, and finally a pair of writers unfettered by prevailing Orientalist modes, Carlos Bulosan and José Garcia Villa. All of these writers present transpacific imaginations unconstrained by their constituting bonds: they fashioned new selves, pitched anti-imperialist philosophies, and produced electrifying art.

This chapter approaches Carlos Bulosan’s oeuvre, and specifically America Is in the Heart, through the framework of postcolonial ecocriticism. It provides an overview of Bulosan’s life, works, and critical reception. Additionally, the chapter presents the history of US empire as a crucial context shaping Bulosan’s writing. It argues that Bulosan’s environmental imaginary is central to his political critique and identifies the postcolonial pastoral, described by Rob Nixon as a form of “environmental double-consciousness,” as central to Bulosan’s depiction of the Philippines in America Is in the Heart. This environmental double-consciousness emerges in America Is in the Heart not only in depictions of the ongoing consequences of dispossession and colonialism in the Philippines, but also in representations of US landscapes as themselves haunted by the USA’s colonial investment in the Philippines.

This chapter connects Asian American literature to the revolutionary cultural and political networks associated with the Popular Front and Soviet Union of the interwar years. The chapter begins by noting the relative absence of Asian Americans from these networks through a discussion of Carlos Bulosan, whose writings were forced to navigate constraining Popular Front representations of Asia and Asians. The chapter then turns to the author and actor H. T. Tsiang, whose combinations of realism and exoticism are shown to echo both Soviet socialist realism and Karl Marx’s notion of the “Asiatic Mode of Production.” The latter emerges as a tool used by Tsiang to nuance Marxist revolution: to think beyond the linear revolutionary scheme disastrously applied to China by the Soviet-led Comintern; and beyond the limits of Popular Front literary norms. The result is a flexible, inclusive vision of the interwar international left, one attendant to vernacular histories and traditions.

This chapter examines twentieth and twenty-first century US farmworker literature. It argues that US farmworker literature distinguishes itself from the Jeffersonian agrarianism dominant in literary and cultural representations of US farmers by not only exposing the systems of power and privilege through which farmworkers are exploited, but also positioning farmworkers as key conveyors of environmental knowledge. And it shows how farmworker epistemologies in US literature and culture offer a critical vantage point on both the industrial food system and the larger systems of colonialism, capitalism, and racism upon which the industrial food system relies. The chapter considers Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown (1939), Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) as examples of farmworker literature that both address the conditions of exploitation facing farm laborers in the industrial food system, including economic and environmental violence, and foreground farmworkers’ environmental knowledge.