Abstract: The “Chinese Question” and the “Negro Problem” were inextricably enmeshed with each other at the turn between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The figures of the “Negro” and the “Asiatic” were often positioned against each other in political, cultural, legislative, and literary discourses to enforce the Anglo-European, “white” racial identity of American national subjects; African Americans and Asians stood as representatives of those who could never be incorporated into the national narrative. The argument that I make for the Asian American and African American texts depends upon contextualizing them within this history of multiracial dynamics. While several literary studies have examined the cultural and political interplay between African Americans and European Americans, or Asians and European Americans, Almost American examines how Asian Americans and African Americans depict one another in fictional works of the early twentieth century. The writers and texts that I examine in this dissertation—Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, Wu Tingfang's America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat, Sui Sin Far's short fiction, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, W. E. B. DuBois' Dark Princess, and Younghill Kang's East Goes West—represent cross-racial figures in a number of ways and for a variety of political purposes. I argue that by portraying cross-racial figures in their texts, these African American and Asian authors of the early twentieth century both recognized the versatility and multiplicity of racially exclusive social and political policies, and intervened into these racially exclusive constructions of American identity. The purpose of this project is to chart how African American and Asia American authors used cross-racial representations to respond to the “tricolor drama” that shaped and reshaped who could be included in America.