Karen Kuo's East Is West and West Is East: Gender, Culture, and Interwar Encounters between Asia and America is a lively and erudite engagement with a range of cultural texts from the interwar period of the early twentieth century. From literature, to film, to autobiography, the reader is cogently guided from text to text with a range of historical and theoretical insights.

In her selected texts, Kuo considers both “Asia” and “America” and the ways in which “both took on an array of imaginative projections that tested the capaciousness of American modernity” (3). She considers the 1930 Hollywood film East Is West (restricted in terms of distribution because of its treatment of miscegenation), Younghill Kang's novel East Goes West, Frank Capra's film adaptation of Lost Horizon, and Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life, the autobiography of Japanese feminist Baroness Shidzue Ishimoto. Kuo asserts that both “white and Asian subjects defined their respective racialized formations of modern identity, femininity, masculinity and sexuality through and against each other” (3). The approach here is both interdisciplinary and multidirectional, illustrating how the cross-cultural encounter is more about mutual gazing than about unidirectional flows, although Kuo does not lose sight of the very real power asymmetry that animates the gazing. She thoughtfully explores the contradictions and complexities of the rise of the US as a global power and self-declared model of democratic modernity, as well as site of policy formation that reinforced older racisms and exclusions with a twentieth-century twist.

Kuo is at her best when she plumbs the depths of intersecting anxieties linked to multiple axes of identity, particularly gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and notions of national belonging. She connects individual stories of self to the transnational flows and exchanges that inform literary, cultural, and economic production. Texts become maps for reading stresses, responses, and the formation of attitudes that endure today. We are constantly reminded of the ways in which globality has multiple pasts and midwives.

Organizationally, the book is a highly teachable text for a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in cultural studies, Asian American studies, gender studies, literature and drama, and fits nicely into a growing body of work on American orientalism and transnational American and transpacific studies. I appreciated the way each chapter conclusion looked to the subsequent chapter, weaving the narrative together in a seamless fashion. Although each of the chapters broke new ground in terms of bidirectional analysis and theorized yet accessible insights, this reader was particularly impressed with the chapter on Ishimoto and transnational feminism. None of the chosen texts has been given the sort of attention it clearly deserves and Kuo helps to recuperate all of them for critical consideration. The range and depth of the texts is compelling. For example, a work such as Kang's East Goes West has received significant scholarly attention recently (although it was certainly overlooked for far too long) but it is placed in conversation with other texts in heretofore unexplored ways. As I said, however, it was the analysis of Ishimoto and Margaret Sanger's cross-cultural exchanges around women's lives and reproductive agency that was particularly fresh. Kuo deftly unpacks the contradictions in Sanger's feminist rhetoric while showing the ways in which Ishimoto was reaching beyond nation to a more pluralistic and global critique of normative gender ideologies. As I read the Ishimoto chapter I found myself wishing that Kuo had spent more time exploring historical/temporal responses to her chosen texts (she does this nicely with Capra's cinematic rendering of Lost Horizon). However, this book works well because of the range of texts it keeps within its interdisciplinary frame, so if one must choose between breadth and depth given particular limits, Kuo made the right choice for this particular work. I will hope that she or other scholars dig more deeply into the lesser-known texts she discusses here. She has clearly laid out an ambitious agenda for those who wish to follow in the path she has cut.

Kuo does indeed show, as she promises at the outset of her book, “how Asian and white subjects struggle against constant efforts at recontainment due to persistent fears over racial, sexual, and cultural mixing that endure even today” (22). Her conclusion is a tour de force of synthesis and cultural analysis. But to reveal her forceful insights here would be to dilute her carefully argued coda. I leave it to readers to buy the book and mull over Kuo's fine work for themselves.