Race And Migration In The Transpacific

Looking at a range of cases from around the Transpacific, the contributors to this book explore the complex formulations of race and racism emerging from transoceanic migrations and encounters in the region. Asia has a history of ceaseless, active, and multidirectional migration, which continues to bear multilayered and complex genetic diversity. The traditional system of rank order between groups of people in Asia consisted of multiple “invisible” differences in variegated entanglements, including descent, birthplace, occupation, and lifestyle. Transpacific migration brought about the formation of multilayered and complex racial relationships, as the physically indistinguishable yet multifacetedly racialized groups encountered the hegemonic racial order deriving from the transatlantic experience of racialization based on “visible” differences. Each chapter in this book examines a different case study, identifying their complexities and particularities while contributing to a broad view of the possibilities for solidarity and human connection in a context of domination and discrimination. These cases include the dispossession of the Ainu people, the experiences of Burakumin emigrants in America, the policing of colonial Singapore, and data governance in India. A fascinating read for sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, especially those with a particular focus on the Asian and Pacific regions.

"This timely book reveals how the increase in traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" beginning in the late nineteenth century, when mass quantities of nursery stock and other agricultural products were shipped from large, corporate nurseries in Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Jeannie Shinozuka marshals extensive research to explain how the categories of "native" and "invasive" defined groups as bio-invasions that must be regulated-or somehow annihilated-during a period of American empire-building. Shinozuka shows how the modern fixation on foreign species provided a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that gained ground in the early twentieth century. Xenophobia fed concerns about biodiversity, and in turn facilitated the implementation of plant quarantine measures while also valuing, and devaluing, certain species over others. The emergence and rise of economic entomology and plant pathology alongside public health and anti-immigration movements was not merely coincidental. Ultimately, what this book unearths is that the inhumane and unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II cannot, and should not, be disentangled from this longer history"--

Gendering the Trans-Pacific World introduces an emergent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field that highlights the inextricable link between gender and the trans-Pacific world. The anthology examines the geographies of empire, the significance of intimacy and affect, the importance of beauty and the body, and the circulation of culture.

Concerned with people called variously: eta, burakumin, buraku jumin, buraku people, outcastes, or "the lowest of the low", this book examines how their experience of caste/status-based discrimination in 19th century Japan affected their experience of race-based discrimination in the West of the US and Canada in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse. Racial capitalism is not simply a permutation, phase, or stage in the larger history of capitalism—since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racial, deriving social and economic value from racial classification and stratification. Although Cedric J. Robinson popularized the term, racial capitalism has remained undertheorized for nearly four decades. Histories of Racial Capitalism brings together for the first time distinguished and rising scholars to consider the utility of the concept across historical settings. These scholars offer dynamic accounts of the relationship between social relations of exploitation and the racial terms through which they were organized, justified, and contested. Deploying an eclectic array of methods, their works range from indigenous mortgage foreclosures to the legacies of Atlantic-world maroons, from imperial expansion in the continental United States and beyond to the racial politics of municipal debt in the New South, from the ethical complexities of Latinx banking to the postcolonial dilemmas of extraction in the Caribbean. Throughout, the contributors consider and challenge how some claims about the history and nature of capitalism are universalized while others remain marginalized. By theorizing and testing the concept of racial capitalism in different historical circumstances, this book shows its analytical and political power for today’s scholars and activists.

Colony to nation? Isolationism to internationalism? WASP society to a multicultural Canada? Focusing on imperial conflicts in the Pacific, Orienting Canada disrupts these familiar narratives in Canadian history by tracing the relationship between racism and Canadian foreign policy. Grounded in transnationalism and anti-racist theory, this book reassesses critical transpacific incidents, including Vancouver's riots of 1907, the Chinese head tax, the wars in the pacific from 1937 to 1945, the internment of Japanese-Canadians, and Canada’s significant role in consolidating the US anti-communist empire in postwar Asia. Shocking revelations about the effects of racism and war into the 1960s are tempered by stories of community resilience and transformation. As a transpacific lens on the past, Orienting Canada deflects Canada’s European gaze back onto itself to reveal images that both provoke and unsettle.

Conventionally, US immigration history has been understood through the lens of restriction and those who have been barred from getting in. In contrast, The Good Immigrants considers immigration from the perspective of Chinese elites—intellectuals, businessmen, and students—who gained entrance because of immigration exemptions. Exploring a century of Chinese migrations, Madeline Hsu looks at how the model minority characteristics of many Asian Americans resulted from US policies that screened for those with the highest credentials in the most employable fields, enhancing American economic competitiveness. The earliest US immigration restrictions targeted Chinese people but exempted students as well as individuals who might extend America's influence in China. Western-educated Chinese such as Madame Chiang Kai-shek became symbols of the US impact on China, even as they patriotically advocated for China's modernization. World War II and the rise of communism transformed Chinese students abroad into refugees, and the Cold War magnified the importance of their talent and training. As a result, Congress legislated piecemeal legal measures to enable Chinese of good standing with professional skills to become citizens. Pressures mounted to reform American discriminatory immigration laws, culminating with the 1965 Immigration Act. Filled with narratives featuring such renowned Chinese immigrants as I. M. Pei, The Good Immigrants examines the shifts in immigration laws and perceptions of cultural traits that enabled Asians to remain in the United States as exemplary, productive Americans.

"Published in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University."