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.

In this chapter, I argue that Asian American modernists Yone Noguchi, Sadakichi Hartmann, and José Garcia Villa experimented with the orientalist styles that were made popular by poets Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound. Writing during the period of Asian exclusion in the USA (1882-1946), these three poets responded to the ideological contradictions between elitism and universalism that were present in Whitman’s and Pound’s poetry by calling for a more democratic and egalitarian America. Noguchi’s and Hartmann’s Japanese American haiku and tanka and Villa’s style of “reversed consonance” — “a new method of rhyming…which has never been used in the history of English poetry” — also articulate a queer diaspora that exposes heteronormative structures of power and calls on the USA to be more inclusive of racial and gay others. They do so by using nonbinary motifs in their poetry which critique the binary structure of racial exclusion: native/foreign. These nonbinary motifs are what theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call “rhizomatic,” which is a theoretic concept that organizes ideas through nonhierarchical multiplicities. The rhizomes of their poetry are composed of “deterritorializing” the normativity of Asian exclusion and heterosexuality and “reterritorializing” the American landscape through inclusion. Despite their politics of inclusion, their works problematically objectify women.

This chapter investigates four representative plays from a quartet of writers that serve as precursors to the instantiation of Asian American theater: Bret Harte’s Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876), Sadakichi Hartmann’s Osadda’s Revenge (c. 1890), Yone Noguchi’s published kyogen in English (1907), and Hong Shen’s The Wedded Husband (1921). These works reveal evidence of various textual migrations that provide different contexts in formal and thematic terms for the historiography of Asian American theater, in particular, and Asian American literature more generally. The Asian immigrant writers covered in the chapter suggest that the genre often thought to inaugurate an Asian American literary tradition – that is, life writing — overlaps with and is preceded by drama. This genealogy indicates that considerations of theatrical form might supersede the representation of immigrant experience.

Recent calls for post-critique have proceeded from the twin assumptions that “critique” has been the dominant form of literary scholarship in the United States and that “compositionism” offers something qualitatively new. However, Whitman’s writings on compost and composition illustrate that compositionist thinking is not that new. In addition, the writings of one of Whitman’s earliest exponents, Japanese-German émigré and literary critic Sadakichi Hartmann, exemplify how abstentions from critique appeared decades prior to the institutionalization of critique in the American academy. Hartmann’s Conversations with Walt Whitman(1895),a memorial pamphlet published a year after the older poet’s death, enters into a spiritual dialogue with the principles of composition outlined by Whitman in Specimen Days & Collect(1882). A close analysis of this dialogue illustrates the value of understanding abstentions from critique and turns to composition as recurrent, nonexceptional modes of American racial and national formation.