Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity by Sheng-mei Ma is a highly readable collection of essays that reflect on issues such as East-West relations, Orientalism, modernity, immigration, and the diaspora through close readings of mostly contemporary East Asian and Asian American literary and popular cultural productions. The term “East-West modernity” in the title should be appropriately understood as an analytical approach to modernity from the perspective of the “East-West power dynamic” (p. 3). Likewise, “Asian diaspora” refers more to diasporic perspectives than to actual diasporic communities in specific historical and sociological contexts. The essays cover an impressive array of cultural texts, ranging from Asian horror films to Asian American children's and young adult books, novels by Chang-rae Lee and Kazuo Ishiguro, Japanese manga, and the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

This is not your typical study of Asian or Asian American literature. Ma's choice of subject, such as the cell phone and horror, gambling, and cannibalism, makes it possible for him to create unexpected juxtapositions of Western, Asian, and Asian American texts and chart out a comparative field that is both lively and transnational. For instance, the book begins with a chapter that studies the “wed[ding]” of “Western technology with ‘Asianness’” in the production of Korean and Japanese horror movies. It goes on to read the representations of working-class and upper-class gambler in Asian American literature and Asian cinema as an illustration of “the ambivalent desire of the Asian mimic man trying to catch up with Western modernity” (p. 36). The writer's expertise in Asian American literature is detectable in the several chapters that examine diasporic identity construction in children's literature, but he also shows just as much interest in Asian literary pop culture and cross-cultural politics in chapters that examine the representations of Asians in Western war narratives, from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead to J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, or consider Zhang Yimou's production of the hyperreal Beijing in the Olympics ceremony in contrast to the works of China's “Six Generation” directors (p. 142).

Reading through these essays can prove to be a worthwhile exercise in enlarging one's cultural repertoire, but one cannot help but wonder what holds these considerations of disparate subject and diverse cultural texts together. Indeed, Ma makes it abundantly clear in the introduction and throughout the chapters that a central theme of these essays is Orientalism, understood not just as a mechanism of “control [toward] the East,” but also a strange fascination with the East, the desire “to identify with or lose oneself in it” (p. 3). The West does not monopolize Orientalism. Rather, it is intrinsic to Asian modernities and Asian American culture. In claiming to speak on behalf of “Asia,” though, Ma hardly questions what constitutes “Asia” or “Asian culture.” What binds the Japanese and Korean horror movies or the Korean soaps together? If they all manifest some form of “East-ness,” then what precisely would this be? Would not a neglect of these questions make one equally vulnerable to the charge of Orientalist mystification, which Ma directs at Asian American writers?

I am not suggesting this book should therefore have been written instead as an area studies monograph about Asia or Asian pop culture. But rather than excavating each text as a specific occasion of the East-West encounter, Ma tends to approach them armed with preconceived assumptions about the shape and form of such encounter. Hence we see in the chapters more attention devoted to thematic issues rather than to language, form, or aesthetics. There is also a general tendency of privileging the author's own views over preexisting studies or considerations of the texts' reception in the United States and Asia. While all the chapters have a few citations, they include no footnotes. If the author's intention is to “probe into the conjoinedness of West and East, . . . [and] render fluid the two hemispheres of the globe” (p. 5), it would be counterproductive to assume that the identity of a cultural product can be transparently revealed without any deep engagement with its mode of production, reception, or aesthetics.

It is this simplification in textual analysis that generates for this reader a sense of disjunction between the plethora of cultural texts introduced in the book and the uniformity of conclusions from one chapter to the next. I was struck by a sense of monotony and repetition halfway into the book and found myself wishing for a few more unexpected reading strategies or surprising arguments, which do not appear until the end. This book might conceivably be used as a secondary source in an undergraduate class on Asian and Asian American culture, but it falls short as a model of rigorous research in the areas of comparative cultural studies or trans-Pacific cultural exchange.