Asian North American Literature’s Regional Origins; or, When Winnifred Eaton became Canadian

This essay reclaims Asian North American literature’s regional origins. I turn to the case of Winnifred Eaton (1875–1954), a complicated figure in Asian North American literary history. Although Eaton herself was of Chinese and British ancestry, for years she adopted the Japanese persona Onoto Watanna and published Orientalist popular romances. In 1917 Eaton moved to Alberta, began publishing regionalist fiction, and rebranded herself as Canadian. Eaton’s biography, literary experiments, and Canadian publications destabilize the central tenets of Asian American literary history: its relationship to transnational geographies; its ties to the political; and its literary forms. Drawing together Asian American, Asian Canadian, and regionalist scholarship, work on the cross-border publishing market, and archival research, I link Eaton’s regional forms to US, Canadian, and Asian literary and political dynamics. The first two sections analyze Cattle (1923), a book that blends techniques of nineteenth-century regionalist fiction with experiments in queer modernist form. The final section analyzes unpublished manuscripts in Eaton’s archive. Eaton thought of herself as a professional writer, and more specifically, a novelist. Her regionalist work was informed by a period in which the threat of yellow peril was a cross-border issue, and her desire to reimagine the genre of fiction.