Inter-Imperial Relations, the Pacific, and Asian American History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Augusto Espiritu
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Asian America ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Asian American History ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Over Time

Despite the turn toward diasporic, transnational, global, and comparative perspectives, this chapter argues that historians of Asian America have largely neglected and need to reflect upon inter-imperial relations--the relations of cooperation, competition, and conflict between empires, including subaltern attempts at creating spaces for maneuver and agency between them. With a focus on the development of the United States as an empire, this article identifies the key inter-imperial relations over time that have shaped the Asian American experience. An awareness of inter-imperial relations helps scholars to account for the political dynamics, the multiple sources of power, and the challenges to existing hegemonies that have structured Asian American lives. An approach sensitive to inter-imperial relations opens up the possibility of recognizing, and comparing, the simultaneous subaltern struggles that cut across nations and immigrant groups.

Inter-Imperial Relations, the Pacific, and Asian American History

2012 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Augusto Espiritu
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Asian America ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
Asian American History ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Over Time

Despite the turn toward diasporic, transnational, global, and comparative perspectives, this article argues that historians of Asian America have largely neglected and need to reflect upon inter-imperial relations—the relations of cooperation, competition, and conflict between empires, including subaltern attempts at creating spaces for maneuver and agency between them. With a focus on the development of the United States as an empire, this article identifies the key inter-imperial relations over time that have shaped the Asian American experience. An awareness of inter-imperial relations helps scholars to account for the political dynamics, the multiple sources of power, and the challenges to existing hegemonies that have structured Asian American lives. An approach sensitive to inter-imperial relations opens up the possibility of recognizing, and comparing, the simultaneous subaltern struggles that cut across nations and immigrant groups.

Surviving the Bomb in America

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (3) ◽  
pp. 472-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naoko Wake
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Asian America ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Costs ◽  
Asian American Identity ◽  
And Gender

This article explores the little-known history of Japanese American survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. By focusing on this particular group of survivors with a careful attention to their layered citizenship, national belonging, and gender identity, the article makes important connections between the history of the bomb and the history of immigration across the Pacific. U.S. survivors were both American citizens and immigrants with deep ties to Japan. Their stories expand our understanding of the bomb by taking it out of the context of the clash between nations and placing it in the lives of people who were not within a victors-or-victims dichotomy. Using oral histories with U.S. survivors, their families, and their supporters, the article reveals experiences, memories, and activism that have connected U.S. survivors to both Japan and the United States in person-centered, relatable ways. Moreover, the article brings to light under-explored aspects of Asian America, namely, significant intersections of former internees’ and bomb survivors’ experiences and the role of older women’s agency in the making of Asian American identity. In so doing, the article destabilizes the rigidly nation-bound understanding of the bomb and its human costs that has prevailed in the Pacific region.

The Asian Turns

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 906-917 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Hayot
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian America ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Global Modernity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Material History ◽  
African America

Everybody Loves a CrisisThe story of what's what in asian american studies is like the story of the profession at large: no one thinks in a vacuum. But the current drift in literary scholarship toward questions of transnationalism and globalization arrives at shores long explored by scholars who work on Asian America and the Pacific. Much of this familiarity has to do with the material history of their subjects, the ways in which questions of diaspora and integration, relations between the flows of people and the flows of things, and the narratives of international politics and imperialist violence constitute the ground of Asian America and indeed of the concept of the Pacific as an ocean, a sea of islands, a limit to westward expansion, and the lubricated surface of a certain transcultural history. The critical insights that unfold from the labor of Asian Americanist thought, like those gained through the study of African America and the Caribbean, do not add ethnographic detail to some larger and fundamentally established picture of the history of the United States or global modernity: they change the picture. They reframe it.

Asian American History across the Pacific

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lon Kurashige
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian American History ◽  
The Pacific

I have never had the opportunity to reflect on my developing interest in Japan, so I welcome the invitation by Professors Takezawa and Okihiro to consider my positionality as a researcher of Asian American history. I do this in light of the exchange between U.S.-based and Japan-based scholars of Nikkei studies held in Shinagawa (Tokyo) in July 2012. This reflection is rooted in personal views, memories, and experiences, because these have been the most powerful influences on my thinking. Yet in focusing on the personal I will not ignore structures of colonialism and racism that have shaped my personal identity within the United States and Japan....

Commentary: Widening the Lens and Rethinking Asian American History

2007 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 605-610
Author(s):  
THOMAS BENDER
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
American History ◽  
New Work ◽  
Asian American History ◽  
Comparative Aspect ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Conceptual Clarity ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
New Research ◽  
East West

The new research here reported is extending Asian American and American history into the Pacific, complementing recent Atlantic world studies. Such extension fundamentally challenges the dominant east-west movement of American history. These essays offer (or reveal the need for) greater conceptual clarity in defining terms in the field and the scope of the field's international dimensions. This new work highlights the importance of including a comparative aspect of transnational and global approaches to American history. While Pacific-wide or global developments may share a common history, there are also very specific local histories that demand distinction and invite comparison. Collectively, the essays gathered together suggest a more capacious definition of the field.

CIVILIZING HAWAII: ISABELLA BIRD BISHOP IN THE SANDWICH ISLANDS

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-370
Author(s):  
Precious McKenzie Stearns
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Coral Reefs ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Missionaries ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
China And Japan

Nineteenth-century male European travel writers sometimes romanticize their destinations and dream they have arrived in untouched lands. The Hawaii Isabella Bird visited, however, was not an idyllic land, forgotten by time. Early in the nineteenth century, steamships crossed the Pacific, carrying goods and people from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, China, and Japan. The trade in sandalwood and fur brought many foreign steamships into Hawaii (Kuykendall 15). It was not uncommon for American missionaries to arrive in Hawaii via whaling ships that stopped in Hawaii (Kuykendall 16, 41). Hawaii, with its position between mainland America and Asia, was a valuable and strategic piece of property. Isabella Bird Bishop's 1875 travel memoir The Hawaiian Archipelago: Six months Among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs, and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands comments on the political situation the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) faced in the nineteenth century.

Diverse and Transnational: Chinese (PRC) Immigrants in the United States

2007 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xia-Huang Yin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Immigrant Group ◽  
Recent Immigrants ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Socioeconomic Diversity ◽  
American Society ◽  
The U.S

AbstractThis article studies characteristics of recent immigrants from China (PRC) in the United States, especially their socioeconomic status and networking with their native land. The unprecedented, large-scale, and highly diversified immigration from China to the U.S. since the late 1970s has not only turned the Chinese into the second largest immigrant group in American society, but has also created new opportunities for interpretation of the Chinese diasporic experience. By examining the socioeconomic diversity among PRC immigrants in their American life and the extensive networks they have established across the Pacific, the article shows how class, ethnicity, and transnationality work at cross purposes in the Chinese American experience and sheds light on the new dynamics in overseas Chinese communities in this rapidly changing era.

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