The Flip Side

by Professor Stuart Christie

ISBN: 9781743329931

Published: 2024-12

Benefiting from recently catalogued archival materials, The Flip Side: Old China Hands and the American Popular Imagination, 1935-1985 evaluates the influence of an ensemble of well-known Americans born and bred in China - Pearl S. Buck, Henry R. Luce, Owen Lattimore and John Hersey - after their return to the United States of America. The children of missionaries, all contributed in significant ways to the globalisation of the "American ideal" in the 20th century, even as each sought in different roles - as publishers, as novelists, as scholars - to centre Chinese and "Asian" values and concerns in the anglophone public sphere. The resulting torque, as Chinese ideas and values met the projection of American "soft" power and governmentality, created a uniquely bilateral, global imaginary where respect for China as an emerging force encountered Western reaction. For these "old China hands", the return to the USA resulted in then-unique and discrepant socio-cultural formations:...