Testing the Limits of Postwar Reform

Author(s):  
Jane H. Hong

This chapter charts the formal repeal of Asian exclusion from the vantage point of the Japanese American Citizens League and of other Americans involved in the postwar campaigns that culminated in the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act. Generally known as a Cold War measure, the law’s lesser known provisions formally ended Asian exclusion as a feature of U.S. immigration and naturalization policy. But a “colonial quota” amendment spurred protest by African and Afro-Caribbean American activists, who denounced it as an underhanded attempt by racist lawmakers to end black immigration from the Caribbean. This little-known episode of black-Japanese conflict problematizes an easy analogy between postwar legislative gains for Asian Americans and those for black Americans as wholly complementary developments; to the contrary, it identifies the postwar immigration debates as a site of greater intergroup competition than collaboration.

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-488
Author(s):  
Monica Eppinger

Abstract Major twentieth-century social theories like socialism and liberalism depended on property as an explanatory principle, prefiguring a geopolitical rivalry grounded in differing property regimes. This article examines the Cold War as an under-analyzed context for the idea of “the tragedy of the commons.” In Soviet practice, collectivization was meant to provide the material basis for cultivating particular forms of sociability and an antidote to the ills of private property. Outsiders came to conceptualize it as tragic in both economic and political dimensions. Understanding the commons as a site of tragedy informed Western “answers” to the “problem” of Soviet collective ownership when the Cold War ended. Privatization became a mechanism for defusing old tragedies, central to a post-Cold War project of advancing “market democracy.” Meanwhile, the notion of an “illiberal commons” stands ready for redeployment in future situations conceived as tragically problematic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-150
Author(s):  
Nicole A. Jacoberger

This article examines the contrasting evolution in sugar refining in Jamaica and Barbados incentivized by Mercantilist policies, changes in labor systems, and competition from foreign sugar revealing the role of Caribbean plantations as a site for experimentation from the eighteenth through mid-nineteenth century. Britain's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century protectionist policies imposed high duties on refined cane-sugar from the colonies, discouraging colonies from exporting refined sugar as opposed to raw. This system allowed Britain to retain control over trade and commerce and provided exclusive sugar sales to Caribbean sugar plantations. Barbadian planters swiftly gained immense wealth and political power until Jamaica and other islands produced competitive sugar. The Jamaica Assembly invested heavily in technological innovations intended to improve efficiency, produce competitive sugar in a market that eventually opened to foreign competition such as sugar beet, and increase profits to undercut losses from duties. They valued local knowledge, incentivizing everyone from local planters to chemists, engineers, and science enthusiasts to experiment in Jamaica and publish their findings. These publications disseminated important findings throughout Britain and its colonies, revealing the significance of the Caribbean as a site for local experimentation and knowledge.


2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane C. Fujino

This study contrasts Japanese American activism, centering on citizenship struggles surrounding the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, to show alternatives to the emergence of the model minority trope. This complexity of activity worked to create and contest the making of a “successful” minority and ideas about U.S. democracy and equality at mid-century. Through a nuanced interpretation, this article reveals how certain narratives relied on a social progress framework and shifting global Cold War politics to create a “Japanese American Exceptionalism.” The little-known history of Japanese American Cold War progressivism shows the forging of deep solidarities and the refusal to promote domestic rights based on empire building. By inserting Japanese Americans into the “Long” freedom movement historiography, this article further examines intergenerational continuities and ruptures.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-410
Author(s):  
Courtney L. Angelo ◽  
David J. Rosen ◽  
James J. Lange

This is the first record of Eleocharis mutata in Florida, and the second record in the continental USA, suggesting a potential natural range expansion of this species from the Caribbean region. A key to species of Eleocharis subg. Limnochloa in Florida is included, along with a site description of the occurrence, visual aids for identification, and a brief discussion of nativity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 77 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yusuke Kuroki

This brief report used the mortality data to separately examine suicide rates of the six largest Asian American groups: Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. In 2000, Japanese American men (13.8 per 100,000) showed significantly higher suicide rate than Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese American men (7.3, 4.0, and 6.1 per 100,000), whereas Chinese, Korean, and Japanese women (3.7, 3.9, and 4.3 per 100,000) showed higher suicide rates than Indian women (1.2 per 100,000). In 2010, Korean and Japanese American men (19.9 and 15.7 per 100,000) showed higher suicide rates than men of other Asian groups. Korean and Japanese American women (8.1 and 5.0 per 100,000) showed higher suicide rates than Indian and Filipino American women (1.5 and 1.8 per 100,000). The findings challenge the notion that Asian Americans are at low risk for suicide and underscore the importance of examining ethnic variation in suicide behaviors among Asian Americans.


Author(s):  
Tsolin Nalbantian

Chapter 3 examines the 1956 Catholicos election in Lebanon.While the excitement and success of the repatriation movement was a public relations victory for the USSR supported by local Armenian institutions and assisted by Lebanese and Syrian governments, this election became a site of contestation by Cold War powers and by their state and non-state allies and proxies in the Middle East. This analysis allows us to look at the Cold War in the Middle East not from the top down, through the eyes of Washington or Moscow (or Lebanon’s or Egypt’s state authorities, for that matter) during flash points like the 1958 U.S. intervention in Lebanon or the U.S. and Soviet reactions to the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt in 1956. Rather, in that election, Armenians made use of Cold War tensions to designate a leader of the Armenian Church who was seen to suit the community’s interests. That story also expands our understanding of Lebanon’s Armenians: from refugees and outsiders in national politics to true participants, whose own internal politics, moreover, were of interest to Lebanon’s authorities and who by now felt free to invade and use public spaces beyond their own neighborhoods to make political statements.


Author(s):  
Alejandra Bronfman

This chapter opens with an exploration of audience research techniques and the ways that even those conducting the research acknowledged the impossible nature of their task. This sets out the paradox that structures the chapter: even while there was no guarantee that listening publics were listening, they came to occupy a central position in the political struggles of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The notion of fidelity runs through the chapter as it traces the mediated strategies with which institutions and entities vied for the loyalty of listeners and laid the ground for the media battles of the anti-Batista struggle in Cuba. The “radio wars” that erupted in the Caribbean, a series of clandestine broadcasts urging the overthrow of Castro, Trujillo, and Duvalier in the early 1960s, speak to the centrality of mediated interventions in the changing geopolitics of the Cold War. The chapter ends with an emphasis on silence, as it attends to the ways that Jamaican broadcasting continued to speak only to limited publics and tendered a deaf ear to the creole-inflected sounds of politics on the eve of decolonization.


Author(s):  
Scott Selisker

The third chapter considers how technological ideas about “programming”—in cybernetics, computer science, and genetics—broadened the applications of automaton discourse and images. Such ideas were used to represent devalued forms of labor, Asian Americans, and post-Cold War fundamentalism.Selisker analyses the history and discorses that inform stereotypes such as hypertechnologicalorientals and new philosophical concepts like posthumanism.


1998 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 374-400
Author(s):  
Ronald Tadao Tsukashima

This inquiry focuses upon one form of ethnic-collective action among Japanese-American entrepreneurs — in-group trade guilds. They emerge in response to exclusionary and inclusionary forces. The article extends middleman theory to account for ethnic-trade guilds that result from both exclusionary and inclusionary forces and proposes two additional perspectives – competition and enclave theory. Three factors are isolated: 1) interethnic competition, 2) the perceived reciprocal fairness of the resulting competition, and 3) the differential cohesion of ethnic networks. Although the findings support the first and third conditions, the second is questionable. Evidence suggests that ethnic-trade guilds engender more conflict (when competition is defined as unfair rather than fair) than heretofore proposed. Ethnic networks that extend beyond the narrow circle of niche participants constitute the primary building blocks in mobilizing a collective response to intergroup competition. Caution needs to be taken in overstating ethnic solidarity at the expense of a groups diversity, and an explanation of internal dissension is called for in interpreting the emergence of ethnic-collective action.


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