In Culture and Imperialism (1993) Edward W. Said argues that “the most prominent characteristics of modernist culture, which we have tended to derive from purely internal dynamics in Western society, include a response to external pressures on culture from the imperium.” This chapter explores ways in which modernism is a literary historical development of significance for Asian American literature, and vice versa. As Said notes, it may have once seemed a coincidence that the onset of Western modernism was roughly in parallel with the delegitimation of its colonialism, but the case for connections may be hard to dismiss. Asian American literature, then, can be a crucial site for grasping how modernism and decolonization converged and were correlated. And a key way that that correlated convergence becomes evident is through acts of historical recovery, both of texts and within texts.