Subverting Exclusion

Subverting Exclusion
Author: Andrea Geiger
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2011-11-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300177976

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 Right to Exclude

The Right to Exclude
Author: Justin Desautels-Stein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2023-03-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0198862164

In a world in which racism and xenophobia are endemic, what is the role of international law? To the extent international rules are thought to have any relevance at all, the typical approach characterizes international law as on the side of racial justice. Human rights instruments like the United Nations' International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are paradigmatic, offering the world international agreements in which governments are directed to avoid racist behavior and promote antiracist action. In The Right to Exclude, Justin Desautels-Stein goes against the grain and asks whether certain rules of international law might actually produce structures of racial hierarchy, rather than limiting them. The intellectual fulcrum for this production, Desautels-Stein argues, lies in the ideological structures of sovereignty and property, the right to exclude that is shared in those twinned precincts, and the border regimes that result. Applying critical race theory to contemporary problems of migration, nationalism, multiculturalism, decolonization, and self-determination, Desautels-Stein expounds a theory of "postracial xenophobia", a structure of racial ideology that justifies and legitimates a pragmatic account of racialized foreignness, a racial xenos.

A Sense of the City

A Sense of the City
Author: Gala Maria Follaco
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2017-10-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004345388

In A Sense of the City, Gala Maria Follaco examines Nagai Kafū’s (1879-1959) literary construction of urban spatialities from late Meiji through the early Shōwa period. She argues that Kafū’s urban critique was based on his awareness of the cultural sedimentation of the cityscape and of the complex relationship that it bore with the historical framework of modern Japan. With the overall aim to define Kafū’s position within pre-war Japanese literature, Follaco touches upon key issues such as memory, class difference, and language ideologies; draws connections between his sojourn abroad and strategies of “mapping” the city of Tokyo in his literature; and takes into account works previously understudied, including his biography of Washizu Kidō and his photographs.

Garden of the World

Garden of the World
Author: Cecilia M. Tsu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019973478X

Garden of the World examines how overlapping waves of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino immigrants fundamentally altered the agricultural economy and landscape of the Santa Clara Valley as well as white residents' ideas about race, gender, and what it meant to be an American family farmer.

The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History

The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History
Author: David K. Yoo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 544
Release: 2016-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 019061403X

After emerging from the tumult of social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the field of Asian American studies has enjoyed rapid and extraordinary growth. Nonetheless, many aspects of Asian American history still remain open to debate. The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History offers the first comprehensive commentary on the state of the field, simultaneously assessing where Asian American studies came from and what the future holds. In this volume, thirty leading scholars offer original essays on a wide range of topics. The chapters trace Asian American history from the beginning of the migration flows toward the Pacific Islands and the American continent to Japanese American incarceration and Asian American participation in World War II, from the experience of exclusion, violence, and racism to the social and political activism of the late twentieth century. The authors explore many of the key aspects of the Asian American experience, including politics, economy, intellectual life, the arts, education, religion, labor, gender, family, urban development, and legal history. The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History demonstrates how the roots of Asian American history are linked to visions of a nation marked by justice and equity and to a deep effort to participate in a global project aimed at liberation. The contributors to this volume attest to the ongoing importance of these ideals, showing how the mass politics, creative expressions, and the imagination that emerged during the 1960s are still relevant today. It is an unprecedentedly detailed portrait of Asian Americans and how they have helped change the face of the United States.

Logics of Integration

Logics of Integration
Author: Noriaki Hoshino
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2024-07-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 900470745X

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.

Japanese Prostitutes in the North American West, 1887-1920

Japanese Prostitutes in the North American West, 1887-1920
Author: Kazuhiro Oharazeki
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2016-05-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0295806680

This compelling study of a previously overlooked vice industry explores the larger structural forces that led to the growth of prostitution in Japan, the Pacific region, and the North American West at the turn of the twentieth century. Combining very personal accounts with never before examined Japanese sources, historian Kazuhiro Oharazeki traces these women’s transnational journeys from their origins in Japan to their arrival in Pacific Coast cities. He analyzes their responses to the oppression they faced from pimps and customers, as well as the opposition they faced from American social reformers and Japanese American community leaders. Despite their difficult circumstances, Oharazeki finds, some women were able to parlay their experience into better jobs and lives in America. Though that wasn’t always the case, their mere presence here nonetheless paved the way for other Japanese women to come to America and enter the workforce in more acceptable ways. By focusing on this “invisible” underground economy, Japanese Prostitutes in the North American West sheds new light on Japanese American immigration and labor histories and opens a fascinating window into the development of the American West.

Converging Empires

Converging Empires
Author: Andrea Geiger
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2022-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469667843

Making a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the U.S.-Canada border, Andrea Geiger highlights the role that the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship on both sides of the international border from 1867, when the United States acquired Russia's interests in Alaska, through the end of World War II. Imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways as they traversed these borderlands. Adventurers, prospectors, laborers, and settlers from Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Asia made and remade themselves as they crossed from one jurisdiction to another. Within this broader framework, Geiger pays particular attention to the ways in which Japanese migrants and the Indigenous people who had made this borderlands region their home for millennia—Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian among others—negotiated the web of intersecting boundaries that emerged over time, charting the ways in which they infused these reconfigured national, provincial, and territorial spaces with new meanings.

Mary Kitagawa

Mary Kitagawa
Author: Karen M. Inouye
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2024-11-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1503641082

This book tells the story of Japanese Canadian activist Mary Kitagawa. In the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor bombing, Mary was one of roughly 22,000 Nikkei uprooted from their homes on the Pacific coast and forbidden to return to western British Columbia until long after World War II had officially ended. In the decades that followed, Mary and her family navigated financial precarity and ostracism, but also found ways to pursue both economic stability and political engagement. Beginning with Mary's grandparents, who were among the earliest immigrants to Canada from Japan, this book tracks the family's experiences—and those of the larger Nikkei Canadian community—from the late 1800s to the present. Concentrating on the interpersonal and intergenerational bonds that shaped Kitagawa, Karen M. Inouye describes the increasingly activist sensibilities that arose from transformative relationships—with family members, other members of the Nikkei Canadian community, Doukhobors, First Nations peoples, and white allies—as well as in response to the anti-Asian racism that Kitagawa encountered in many forms throughout her life. Inouye presents the Nikkei Canadian experience not as a linear triumph over a single adversity, but as a continual process of identity formation in relation to obstacles and opportunities, suffering and joy, isolation and connection.

Uprooting Community

Uprooting Community
Author: Selfa A. Chew
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2015-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0816531854

Joining the U.S.’ war effort in 1942, Mexican President Manuel Ávila Camacho ordered the dislocation of Japanese Mexican communities and approved the creation of internment camps and zones of confinement. Under this relocation program, a new pro-American nationalism developed in Mexico that scripted Japanese Mexicans as an internal racial enemy. In spite of the broad resistance presented by the communities wherein they were valued members, Japanese Mexicans lost their freedom, property, and lives. In Uprooting Community, Selfa A. Chew examines the lived experience of Japanese Mexicans in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during World War II. Studying the collaboration of Latin American nation-states with the U.S. government, Chew illuminates the efforts to detain, deport, and confine Japanese residents and Japanese-descent citizens of Latin American countries during World War II. These narratives challenge the notion that Japanese Mexicans enjoyed the protection of the Mexican government during the war and refute the mistaken idea that Japanese immigrants and their descendants were not subjected to internment in Mexico during this period. Through her research, Chew provides evidence that, despite the principles of racial democracy espoused by the Mexican elite, Japanese Mexicans were in fact victims of racial prejudice bolstered by the political alliances between the United States and Mexico. The treatment of the ethnic Japanese in Mexico was even harsher than what Japanese immigrants and their children in the United States endured during the war, according to Chew. She argues that the number of persons affected during World War II extended beyond the first-generation Japanese immigrants “handled” by the Mexican government during this period, noting instead that the entire multiethnic social fabric of the borderlands was reconfigured by the absence of Japanese Mexicans.