Pearl S. Buck and the Forgotten Holocaust of the Two-Ocean War



Abstract

Valeria Gennero

Università di Bergamo, Italy

During the Second World War, Pearl S. Buck was both a successful novelist and an influential political organizer, involved in  well-known  campaigns  against  racism  and  imperialism. In  January  1942  she  published Dragon  Seed,  a  novel  which described the Japanese sack of Nanking in 1937 and engaged the issues of nationalism and male violence from a gendered perspective. Buck wrote the novel before the United States entered the war: she hoped to promote American awareness of  the  Chinese  fight  for  freedom,  knowing  that  the  tragic events which took place in Nanking after the fall of the city were virtually unknown in the United States. I will argue that, despite its original propagandistic intent, Dragon Seed succeeds—as Buck’s novels often do—in problematizing the notion of national identity, foregrounding the sexual politics of war.

 


Buck, P. S. 1931. The Good Earth. New York: John Day.

Buck, P. S. 1939. The Patriot. New York: John Day.

Buck, P. S. 1940. ‘Asia Book-Shelf’, in Asia November: 613-614.

Buck, P. S. 1941. Of Men and Women. New York: John Day.

Buck, P. S. 1943. Dragon Seed. [1942] London: Reprint Society.

Buck, P. S. 1954. My Several Worlds: A Personal Record. New York: John Day.

Brook, T. 1999. Documents on the Rape of Nanking. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Cavarero, A. 2011. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. [2007] New York: Columbia University Press.

Chang, I. 1997. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Basic Books.

Conn, P. 1996. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hu, H. 2000. American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: the Courage of Minnie Vautrin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Leong, K. J. 2005. The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mitgang, H. 1996. Dangerous Dossiers. New York: Fine.

Tarrant, S. 2006. When Sex Became Gender. New York: Routledge.


Published : 2014-05-15


GenneroV. (2014). Pearl S. Buck and the Forgotten Holocaust of the Two-Ocean War. Review of International American Studies, 7(1). Retrieved from https://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/article/view/4053

Valeria Gennero  valeria.gennero@unibg.it
Università di Bergamo, Italy  Italy
Valeria Gennero teaches American Literature at the University of Bergamo (Italy). She has published books on Djuna Barnes, Pearl S. Buck and Feminist Literary Theory.



The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.

  1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.

  1. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

  1. User Rights

Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

  1. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.