In the polemical introduction to their 1974 volume Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, editors Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong argued that the majority of Asian American writers “were obviously manipulated by white publishers to write to and from the stereotype,” citing the example of Jade Snow Wong, whose editors deleted more than half of her 1950 memoir Fifth Chinese Daughter.Footnote ¹ Rei Magosaki's Tricksters and Cosmopolitans offers a pointed counternarrative to such stories of exploitation, arguing that on key occasions, “cross-cultural collaborations” between white publishers and Asian American writers have in fact been positive, and have even fostered novelistic critiques of an ever-expanding global capitalism that enmeshes publishers and writers alike.

In training our attention on the role played by editors and publishers in shaping Asian American writing, Tricksters and Cosmopolitans contributes to a recent body of scholarship focused on the institutional contexts that condition and enable the production of contemporary literature. Most prominently, Mark McGurl's groundbreaking study The Program Era demonstrated how the institutionalization of creative writing programs in US universities has shaped the novels of writers from Phillip Roth to Sandra Cisneros, and from Raymond Carver to Toni Morrison.Footnote ² In the specific context of ethnic literary production, both Mark Chiang's fine-grained history of the institutionalization of Asian American studies, The Cultural Capital of Asian American Studies, and Min Hyoung Song's The Children of 1965 have offered new insights into the institutional forces that shape the Asian American literary field.Footnote ³

Magosaki's study joins this conversation by calling attention to the formative impact of a range of publishing contexts on Asian American writing, from the nonprofit, independent Coffee House Press (started by the poet Allan Kornblum) to the major literary publishing house Houghton Mifflin, to the commercial press Warner House. Here Magosaki departs from other accounts of Asian American literary history, which focus on how Asian American periodicals such as Gidra, Aion, and Bridge fostered the emergence of Asian American literature in the 1970s, such as Laura Kang's Compositional Subjects and Timothy Yu's Race and the Avant-Garde.Footnote ⁴ She also refrains for the most part from the more systemic and ideological analyses that characterize McGurl's, Chiang's, and Song's studies, which turn to factors such as the 1960s student movements; the Immigration Reform Act of 1965; and the institutionalization of first, ethnic studies, and later multiculturalism, in shaping the Asian American literary field. Instead, Magosaki foregrounds the agency of individual editors such as William Hayes Ward (one of Sui Sin Far's editors) and Stephen Vincent (Jessica Hagedorn's first editor) in challenging racism to publish and promote anti-Orientalist and multicultural writing. Using this lens across three chronologically arranged chapters, Tricksters and Cosmopolitans considers how editors driven by these multicultural aspirations supported, enabled, and promoted the fiction of Sui Sin Far, Jessica Hagedorn, Karen Tei Yamashita, Monique Truong, and Min Jin Lee. In each case, Magosaki is doubly concerned to trace both the vital influence of different editors in bringing these authors’ works to print and the critiques of global capitalism forwarded within this array of texts.

Indeed, while Tricksters and Cosmopolitans bills its recovery of Asian American publishing history as its chief innovation, its most compelling contributions arguably lie in the nuanced close readings it provides of how these writers represent and reflect upon globalization. For instance, in an extended reading of Hagedorn's novella Pet Food, Magosaki argues that what appears to be a standard bildungsroman in fact exposes the exploitative processes and imperial origins of contemporary globalization. Making inspired use of Alex Woloch's pioneering study of narrative distribution The One vs. the Many, Footnote ⁵ Magosaki convincingly shows how Hagedorn's novella constructs its privileged, cosmopolitan hero's “protagonicity” through the silencing and erasure of marginal, working-class immigrants, a dynamic that she astutely reads as allegorizing both center-periphery relations under global capitalism as well as the hierarchy between the postcolonial author and those she is presumed to “represent” or speak for.

In her third chapter, which covers works by Yamashita, Truong, and Lee, Magosaki further pursues the literary construction of the “Asian cosmopolitan subject” as a vehicle for registering concerns about globalization. In Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, Magosaki again locates a hierarchical divide between cosmopolitan subjects and working-class migrants, while in Truong's The Book of Salt, she finds a reversal of this dynamic, as it is the Vietnamese immigrant cook whose voice supplants that of his elite, cosmopolitan employer, Gertrude Stein. In Min Jin Lee's Free Food for Millionaires, the cosmopolitan subject becomes a figure for mapping the ways that neoliberal capitalism imparts new miseries on middle-class subjects. Magosaki insightfully argues that these critiques of global capitalism were enabled to different degrees by sympathetic editors chafing at the constraints of a publishing industry that was itself becoming increasingly subject to the control of multinational conglomerates.

As this last argument suggests, Magosaki's take on the relationship between Asian American writers and their publishers is resolutely optimistic, in ways that might seem to some readers to overvalorize the multiculturalist intentions of these editors and to discount the structural inequalities and racism that define the literary marketplace. However, in provocatively suggesting occasional political alignments between Asian American writers and their publishers, Tricksters and Cosmopolitans offers a novel contribution to a vein of Asian American criticism inaugurated by scholars such as Viet Thanh Nguyen, Susan Koshy, and Colleen Lye that has begun to challenge the political oppositionality of Asian American subjects. Indeed, Tricksters and Cosmopolitans’ closest forbear is probably Nguyen's Race and Resistance, which urges us to look beyond evaluating a text's resistance or accommodation to dominant culture, and to instead acknowledge the “flexible strategies” that Asian American writers have used to gain a voice in the literary marketplace.Footnote ⁶ Similarly, Magosaki's provocative study encourages us to rethink the conditions of the emergence of Asian American literature in the era of globalization in unexpected and until now unexplored ways. By training our attention on the publishing industry, Magosaki exposes a crucial new arena of investigation for those interested in how transnationalism impacts Asian American culture, while her attentive textual analyses suggest new ways of using narrative insights to understand the complexities of global capitalism.