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This chapter examines Charles Chesnutt's early sketches in Puck, theorizing that the magazine's insensitive treatment of every imaginable ethnic group or identity provided an important laboratory for Chesnutt's apprenticeship in the art of ethnic caricature. Focusing on the radical juxtapositions of ethnic imagery throughout Puck's printed pages, this chapter suggests that Chesnutt's art is uniquely suited to the era's fascination with ethnic typology. Nevertheless, the chapter argues that the use of ethnic caricature by a writer of color produced its own forms of ambivalence.

This chapter examines American novels written in languages other than English and their place in American literature. It first considers the reasons why American writers have used languages other than English, along with the differences between ethnic literature in English and in non-English languages. It then looks at examples of central themes in U.S. literary studies that may benefit from the inclusion of writing in languages other than the English language. It also discusses American novels in Norwegian that were published when sentiment against immigrants was flourishing. Finally, the chapter cites authors who have written novels in non-English languages, including Abraham Cahan, Ole Edvart Rølvaag, Emil Lauritz Mengshoel, and Ole A. Buslett.

In his three novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and The Wasted Vigil (2008), Nadeem Aslam fuses conventional postcolonial themes and literary techniques with a distinctly British sensibility. Born in Pakistan in 1966, he came with his parents to Britain at the age of fourteen, where the family settled in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and has described himself as ‘a Pakistani man living in Britain’. Yet, elsewhere, Aslam is described as ‘Pakistani-British’. This personal history embodies his dual positioning as both British Asian and postcolonial migrant author. In many senses, Aslam, rather than embodying the qualities of British Asian literature, is part of the publishing storm surrounding postcolonial writers that developed in the 1990s. He is evidence of how, to consider British Asian authors simply in relation to an ethnic literature (whether defined as British Asian, Black British or postcolonial) is to neglect wider paradigms in contemporary literary fiction: not just British, but also international.

In 1941, the writer Nogawa Takashi (1901-1944) was both nominated for the Akutagawa Prize in Japan and arrested in Manchukuo for his involvement in the Cooperative Movement (gassakusha undō) in rural north Manchuria. This dissonance between the literary recognition of Nogawa in the imperial metropole and his tragic fate—he died in prison three years after his arrest—marks him as an emblematic figure of the complexities of Manchukuo and the Japanese empire. Drawing on Naoki Sakai’s concept of heterolingual address, this chapter examines how Nogawa’s short story “The People Who Go to the Hamlet” (“Tonzu ni iku hitobito”) narratively stages ethnic interaction in the Cooperative Movement as a process of articulation between individuals in order to explore the (im)possibility of cross-class, cross-ethnic alliance. In contrast with the dominant state metaphor of “ethnic harmony” as a state of being between different peoples, Nogawa’s fiction both portrays and performs acts of “harmonization” and dissonance through grassroots organizing in a way that acknowledges the reality of class and ethnic difference, while also scrutinizing these differences and maintaining their possible permeability.

The introduction traces the book’s main argument and previews its structure. It begins with a discussion of the mobile game Pokémon GO to illustrate popular games’ key role in the construction of modern racial fictions and emphasize the need for a more syncretic methodological approach to such cultural artifacts. After delineating the book’s particular focus on Asian and Asian American topics, the introduction situates the book within the broader fields of game studies, Asian American studies, and literary studies. It introduces a master concept, ludo-Orientalism, and offers an overview of how it functions as a nation-building discourse that defines America and the “West” in relation to abstract game ideals of fairness and freedom, shaping how East-West relations are imagined and reinforcing notions of foreignness and perceptions of racial difference

The crosspollination of literature and lyrics is not a new phenomenon in popular music, and classics of world literature continue to inspire songwriters who incorporate them in their art in different ways and forms. Although perhaps not yet quite recognized as a classic author, the Italian-American novelist John Fante has had an impact on popular culture and music both in Italy and in the United States. Reviewing a range of Italian and American songs that draw inspiration from Arturo Bandini, the protagonist of Fante’s saga, this essay explores the relationship among literature, music, and society through a reflection on the impact that a non-canonical American writer has on popular culture and how his ethnic experience reverberates in the singer/reader/listener’s life before earning approval from mainstream critics.

This chapter talks about the Scottish poet James Macpherson. It analyzes Macpherson's publication of the “Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland,” which he claimed was his own translation into English from old Gaelic manuscripts he discovered in the Scottish Highlands. It also looks into “Fingal,” an Ancient Epic Poem or cycle of poetry presumably sung by the legendary Scottish bard Ossian, which Macpherson also claimed was a translation from the Gaelic. The chapter examines the Ossian cycle that stimulated investigations and searches for ethnic folk literature, particularly for national epics throughout Europe and Russia that represented the mystical spirit of the nation. It looks into skeptics, such as Samuel Johnson, David Hume, and Horace Walpole who expressed doubt about the authenticity of Macpherson's translations.