Steven Yao

Pacific Rim modernisms

The Pacific Rim is a geographical region made up of all areas bordered by the Pacific Ocean, its span reaching countries as diverse as the Canada, Korea, China, Mexico, and Australia. Tracing vectors of appropriation, migration, and exchange, Pacific Rim Modernisms explores the complex ways that writers, artists, and intellectuals of the Pacific Rim have contributed to modernist culture, literature, and identity. Appropriately, given their wide geographical and temporal sweep, the fourteen essays gathered in this volume reflect a range of scholarly perspectives and methodologies, expressing varied viewpoints, divergent voices, and even contradictory definitions of Modernism itself. By placing geographical rather than political boundaries at the centre of academic inquiry, Pacific Rim Modernisms seeks not only to redraw old boundaries but to open up the modernist landscape to new mappings and new debates.

4. Rewriting the Literary History of Japanese Modernism

By adopting an open, multidisciplinary, and transnational approach, this book sheds new light both on the specific achievements and on the often-unexpected interrelationships of the writers, artists and thinkers who helped to define the Japanese version of modernism and modernity.

The motions of the oceans: Circulation, displacement, expansion, and Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart

ABSTRACT This paper identifies in Atlantic studies three fundamental “oceanic” motions and their attendant conditions of possibility that seem useful for further developing the notion of the transpacific as both a feature of and a theater for the rise of global modernity: circulation/commerce; displacement/diaspora; and expansion/empire. To demonstrate their utility, this paper shows how these dyads help bring into focus the deep transpacific currents informing the narrative substance and logic of Carlos Bulosan’s renowned autobiographical narrative, America is in the Heart. In doing so, it puts forth the notion of the “ethnic picaresque” as a way to further develop a transpacific theorization of literary and cultural production by people of Asian descent in the United States and elsewhere that moves expressly beyond the conceptual boundaries of the nation.

13. Pacific Rim Digital Modernism: The Electronic Literature of Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries

Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) is the name of the collaborative duo responsible for some of the most innovative electronic literature online. Situated in Seoul, South Korea, Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge push the boundaries of their art form and our expectations of it. But why should they be included in a collection on modernism? As previous essays in this volume have shown, modernism is an assemblage of pluralities that spans geographic and temporal boundaries. This fact is made vitally and visually evident by the latest iteration of modernism: the contemporary movement I call ‘digital modernism.’1 In this essay, I introduce digital modernism by way of the example provided by YHCHI, arguing that the work of these Korea-based writers exemplifi es digital modernism because it consciously challenges assumptions about electronic literature and promotes reconsideration of how modernism operates in contemporary culture. The result is an opportunity to read both contemporary and canonical literature through a digitally informed lens. Digital modernism is a strategy shared by writers across literary genres and programming platforms, writers who adopt and allude to literary modernism; they adapt aesthetic techniques and seminal works from the modernist canon to construct immanent critiques about a contemporary culture that privileges images, navigation, and interactivity over narrative, reading, and textuality. The result: works of predominantly textual web-based literature that are aesthetically diffi cult and ambivalent in their relationship to mass media and popular readership. Digital modernism is not just an example of postmodern pastiche or retro-remixing but, rather, part of a larger cultural project that produces serious literature and promotes critical reading practices both online and in our digital culture at large.