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.

As the inaugural volume of the new Brill book series Gendering the Trans-Pacific World: Diaspora, Empire, and Race, this anthology presents an emergent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field that highlights the inextricable link between gender and the trans-Pacific world. The anthology features twenty-one chapters by new and established scholars and writers. They collectively examine the geographies of empire, the significance of intimacy and affect, the importance of beauty and the body, and the circulation of culture. This is an ideal volume to introduce advanced undergraduate and graduate students to Transpacific Studies and gender as a category of analysis. Gendering the Trans-Pacific World: Diaspora, Empire, and Race is now available in paperback for individual customers.

Canada’s history, since its birth as a nation one hundred and fifty years ago, is one of immigration, nation-building, and contested racial and ethnic relations. In Immigration, Racial and Ethnic Studies in 150 Years of Canada: Retrospects and Prospects scholars provide a wide-ranging overview of this history with a core theme being one of enduring racial and ethnic conflict and inequality. The volume is organized around four themes where in each theme selected racial and ethnic issues are examined critically. Part 1 focuses on the history of Canadian immigration and nation-building while Part 2 looks at situating contemporary Canada in terms of the debates in the literature on ethnicity and race. Part 3 revisits specific racial and ethnic studies in Canada and finally in Part 4 a state-of-the-art is provided on immigration and racial and ethnic studies while providing prospects for the future. Contributors are: Victor Armony, David Este, Augie Fleras, Peter R. Grant, Shibao Guo, Abdolmohammad Kazemipur, Anne-Marie Livingstone, Adina Madularea, Ayesha Mian Akram, Nilum Panesar, Yolande Pottie-Sherman, Paul Pritchard, Howard Ramos, Daniel W. Robertson, Vic Satzewich, Morton Weinfeld, Rima Wilkes, Lori Wilkinson, Elke Winter, Nelson Wiseman, Lloyd Wong, and Henry Yu.

Trans-Pacific Japanese American Studies is a unique collection of essays derived from a series of dialogues held in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Los Angeles on the issues of racializations, gender, communities, and the positionalities of scholars involved in Japanese American studies. The book brings together some of the most renowned scholars of the discipline in Japan and North America. It seeks to overcome past constraints of dialogues between Japan- and U.S.-based scholars by providing opportunities for candid, extended conversations among its contributors. While each contribution focuses on the field of “Japanese American” studies, approaches to the subject vary—ranging from national and village archives, community newspapers, personal letters, visual art, and personal interviews. Research papers are divided into six sections: Racializations, Communities, Intersections, Borderlands, Reorientations, and Teaching. Papers by one or two Japan-based scholar(s) are paired with a U.S.-based scholar, reflecting the book’s intention to promote dialogue and mutuality across national formations. The collection is also notable for featuring underrepresented communities in Japanese American studies, such as Okinawan “war brides,” Koreans, women, and multiracials. Essays on subject positions raise fundamental questions: Is it possible to engage in a truly equal dialogue when English is the language used in the conversation and in a field where English-language texts predominate? How can scholars foster a mutual respect when U.S.-centrism prevails in the subject matter and in the field’s scholarly hierarchy? Understanding foundational questions that are now frequently unstated assumptions will help to disrupt hierarchies in scholarship and work toward more equal engagements across national divides. Although the study of Japanese Americans has reached a stage of maturity, contributors to this volume recognize important historical and contemporary neglects in that historiography and literature. Japanese America and its scholarly representations, they declare, are much too deep, rich, and varied to contain in a singular narrative or subject position.

Focusing on Los Angeles farmland during the years between the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Japanese Internment in 1942, Transborder Los Angeles weaves together the narratives of Mexican and Japanese immigrants into a single transpacific history. In this book, Yu Tokunaga moves from international relations between Japan, Mexico, and the US to the Southern California farmland, where ethnic Japanese and Mexicans played a significant role in developing local agriculture, one of the major industries of LA County before World War II. Japanese, Mexicans, and white Americans developed a unique triracial hierarchy in farmland that generated both conflict and interethnic accommodation by bringing together local issues and international concerns beyond the Pacific Ocean and the US-Mexico border. Viewing these experiences in a single narrative form, Tokunaga breaks new ground, demonstrating the close relationships between the ban on Japanese immigration, Mexican farmworkers' strikes, wartime Japanese removal, and the Bracero Program.

A sequel to the groundbreaking volume, Race and Racism in Modern East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions, the present volume examines in depth interactions between Western racial constructions of East Asians and local constructions of race and their outcomes in modern times. Focusing on China, Japan and the two Koreas, it also analyzes the close ties between race, racism and nationalism, as well as the links race has had with gender and lineage in the region. Written by some of the field's leading authorities, this insightful and engaging 23-chapter volume offers a sweeping overview and analysis of racial constructions and racism in modern and contemporary East Asia that is unsurpassed in previous scholarship.

With the number of Chinese living outside of its borders expected to reach 52 million by 2030, China has one of the most mobile populations on earth, shaping economies, cultures, and politics around the globe. Trans-Pacific Mobilities charts how the cross-border movement of Chinese people, goods, and images affects notions of place, belonging, and identity, particularly in Canada. Drawing on the new mobilities paradigm, contributors explore this phenomenon through five lenses, mapping out historic, cultural and symbolic, highly skilled, family and gendered, and transnational mobilities. This volume offers fresh insights into historical and contemporary Chinese mobilities and issues of transnationalism.

This broad-based study of Western-Asian relations considers images of and actions by the United States, along with Britain and Germany, in the course of dealings with Asian nations such as China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Other case studies focus on inter-Asian relations between Japan and Korea; China and Japan; and Thailand and Vietnam. The essays encompass a wide range of recent scholarship, including cultural, economic, demographic, and intellectual approaches to military and diplomatic themes. Western influence, primarily American, in Asia grew consistently during the 20th century. While interaction often occurred on unequal terms, this study reveals the ability of Asians to assert their agency in the face of such immense Western power. The collection as a whole offers a window on relations across the Pacific in numerous spheres of activity over the course of one hundred years. As such, it introduces and adds to our understanding of the depth and variety of trans-Pacific relations.

Logics of Integration, by Noriaki Hoshino, recounts the history of the relationship between modern Japanese transpacific migration and the formation of two multi-ethnic empires (Japan and the United States), focusing on intellectual discourses about migrants and their descendants. This book adopts a transnational perspective, juxtaposing two multi-ethnic imperial formations, and develops a theoretical analysis of the discourses on mobility and national/territorial integration. Via this innovative approach, Dr. Hoshino reveals the unique role of Japanese migrants and their representation in the complicated power relationships between the two empires in the modern Pacific world.

Introduction: the trans-Pacific imagination - Rethinking boundary, culture and society / Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo -- Towards a transnational history of victimhood nationalism: on the trans-Pacific space / Jie-Hyun Lim -- The trans-Pacific migrant and area studies / Lisa Lowe -- Imprinting the Empire: Western artists and the persistence of colonialism in East Asia / Tessa Morris-Suzuki -- The political formation of the homoerotics and the Cold War: the battle of gazes at and from Okinawa / Ikuo Shinjou -- Securing Okinawa for miscegenation: gender and trans-Pacific Empire of the United States and Japan / Annmaria Shimabuku -- The politics of postcoloniality and the literature of "Being-in-Japan" (Zainichi) / Hyoduk Lee -- The incurable feminine: women without a country in East Asian cinema / Hyon Joo Yoo -- Inter-Asia comparative framework: postcolonial film historiography in Taiwan and South Korea / Soyoung Kim -- Postcolonial Hiroshima, mon amour: Franco-Japanese collaboration in the American shadow / Yuko Shibata -- Reconceptualizing "East Asia" in the post-Cold War era / Sun Ge -- Trans-Pacific studies and the US-Japan complicity / Naoki Sakai