Transpacific Articulations studies Chinese students’ literary and political activities in the United States and beyond from the 1850s to the 1990s. It shows that the so-called “overseas student literature” signifies both an imaginary passage to modernity and a transnational culture where meanings of Asian America are rearticulated through Chinese, and demonstrates that Chinese student political activities in the late 1960s and 1970s—i.e., the Protect Diaoyutai Movement and the Taiwan Independence Movement—have critical, yet less examined, intersections with the Asian American movement. These diverse political activities, based upon conflicting national identifications, manifest how the Cold War geopolitics entangled Asian nationalisms with diasporic imaginaries and in turn shaped Asian America into a transnational cultural-political space. Finally, it also offers a reflection on the development of Asian American studies in Asia to suggest how movement of knowledge and people impacted the formation of Asian America. A historicallygrounded analysis of these transnationally intersected cultural imaginings, political activism, and intellectual linkages promises to enrich our understanding of Asian America as a transpacific critical formation within and against American modernity and Asian nationalism.

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