Author: Jon Thares Davidann
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824832256
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
Hawai‘i at the Crossroads tells the story of Hawai‘i’s role in the emergence of Japanese cultural and political internationalism during the interwar period. Following World War I, Japan became an important global power and Hawai‘i Japanese represented its largest and most significant emigrant group. During the 1920s and 1930s, Hawai‘i’s Japanese American population provided Japan with a welcome opportunity to expand its international and intercultural contacts. This volume, based on papers presented at the 2001 Crossroads Conference by scholars from the U.S., Japan, and Australia, explores U.S.–Japanese conflict and cooperation in Hawai‘i—truly the crossroads of relations between the two countries prior to the Pacific War. From the 1880s to 1924, 180,000 Japanese emigrants arrived in the U.S. A little less than half of those original arrivals settled in Hawai‘i; by 1900 they constituted the largest ethnic group in the Islands, making them of special interest to Tokyo. Even after its withdrawal from the League of Nations in 1933, Japan viewed Hawai‘i as a largely sympathetic and supportive ally. Through its influential international conferences, Hawai‘i’s Institute of Pacific Relations conducted a program that was arguably the only informal diplomatic channel of consequence left to Japan following its withdrawal from the League. The Islands represented Japan’s best opportunity to explain itself to the U.S.; here American and Japanese diplomats, official and unofficial, could work to resolve the growing tension between their two countries. College exchange programs and substantial trade and business opportunities continued between Japan and Hawai‘i right up until December 1941. While hopes on both sides of the Pacific were shattered by the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japan-Hawai‘i connection underlying not a few of them remains important, informative, and above all compelling. Its further exploration provided the rationale for the Crossroads Conference and the essays compiled here. Contributors: Tomoko Akami, Jon Davidann, Masako Gavin, Paul Hooper, Michiko Itò, Nobuo Katagiri, Hiromi Monobe, Moriya Tomoe, Shimada Noriko, Mariko Takagi-Kitayama, Eileen H. Tamura.
Author: Fiona Paisley
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824833422
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Since its inception in 1928, the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA) has witnessed and contributed to enormous changes in world and Pacific history. Operating out of Honolulu, this women’s network established a series of conferences that promoted social reform and an internationalist outlook through cultural exchange. For the many women attracted to the project—from China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, and the major settler colonies of the region—the association’s vision was enormously attractive, despite the fact that as individuals and national representatives they remained deeply divided by colonial histories. Glamour in the Pacific tells this multifaceted story by bringing together critical scholarship from across a wide range of fields, including cultural history, international relations and globalization, gender and empire, postcolonial studies, population and world health studies, world history, and transnational history. Early chapters consider the first PPWA conferences and the decolonizing process undergone by the association. Following World War II, a new generation of nonwhite women from decolonized and settler colonial nations began to claim leadership roles in the Association, challenging the often Eurocentric assumptions of women’s internationalism. In 1955 the first African American delegate brought to the fore questions about the relationship of U.S. race relations with the Pan-Pacific cultural internationalist project. The effects of cold war geopolitics on the ideal of international cooperation in the era of decolonization were also considered. The work concludes with a discussion of the revival of "East meets West" as a basis for world cooperation endorsed by the United Nations in 1958 and the overall contributions of the PPWA to world culture politics. The internationalist vision of the early twentieth century imagined a world in which race and empire had been relegated to the past. Significant numbers of women from around the Pacific brought this shared vision—together with their concerns for peace, social progress and cooperation—to the lively, even glamorous, political experiment of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association. Fiona Paisley tells the stories of this extraordinary group of women and illuminates the challenges and rewards of their politics of antiracism—one that still resonates today.
Author: David Armitage
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 113700164X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
The first comprehensive account to place the Pacific Islands, the Pacific Rim and the Pacific Ocean into the perspective of world history. A distinguished international team of historians provides a multidimensional account of the Pacific, its inhabitants and the lands within and around it over 50,000 years, with special attention to the peoples of Oceania. It providing chronological coverage along with analyses of themes such as the environment, migration and the economy; religion, law and science; race, gender and politics.
Author: Gregory T. Cushman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107004136
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
This book traces the history of bird guano, demonstrating how this unique commodity helped unite the Pacific Basin with the industrialized world.
Author: Thomas W. Burkman
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824863038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
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Book Description
Japan joined the League of Nations in 1920 as a charter member and one of four permanent members of the League Council. Until conflict arose between Japan and the organization over the 1931 Manchurian Incident, the League was a centerpiece of Japan’s policy to maintain accommodation with the Western powers. The picture of Japan as a positive contributor to international comity, however, is not the conventional view of the country in the early and mid-twentieth century. Rather, this period is usually depicted in Japan and abroad as a history of incremental imperialism and intensifying militarism, culminating in war in China and the Pacific. Even the empire’s interface with the League of Nations is typically addressed only at nodes of confrontation: the 1919 debates over racial equality as the Covenant was drafted and the 1931–1933 League challenge to Japan’s seizure of northeast China. This volume fills in the space before, between, and after these nodes and gives the League relationship the legitimate place it deserves in Japanese international history of the 1920s and 1930s. It also argues that the Japanese cooperative international stance in the decades since the Pacific War bears noteworthy continuity with the mainstream international accommodationism of the League years. Thomas Burkman sheds new light on the meaning and content of internationalism in an era typically seen as a showcase for diplomatic autonomy and isolation. Well into the 1930s, the vestiges of international accommodationism among diplomats and intellectuals are clearly evident. The League project ushered those it affected into world citizenship and inspired them to build bridges across boundaries and cultures. Burkman’s cogent analysis of Japan’s international role is enhanced and enlivened by his descriptions of the personalities and initiatives of Makino Nobuaki, Ishii Kikujirô, Nitobe Inazô, Matsuoka Yôsuke, and others in their Geneva roles.
Author: Sarah M Griffith
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252050355
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
From the early 1900s, liberal Protestants grafted social welfare work onto spiritual concerns on both sides of the Pacific. Their goal: to forge links between whites and Asians that countered anti-Asian discrimination in the United States. Their test: uprooting racial hatreds that, despite their efforts, led to the shameful incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II. Sarah M. Griffith draws on the experiences of liberal Protestants, and the Young Men's Christian Association in particular, to reveal the intellectual, social, and political forces that powered this movement. Engaging a wealth of unexplored primary and secondary sources, Griffith explores how YMCA leaders and their partners in the academy and distinct Asian American communities labored to mitigate racism. The alliance's early work, based in mainstream ideas of assimilation and integration, ran aground on the Japanese exclusion law of 1924. Yet their vision of Christian internationalism and interracial cooperation maintained through the World War II internment trauma. As Griffith shows, liberal Protestants emerged from that dark time with a reenergized campaign to reshape Asian-white relations in the postwar era.
Author: Etsuko Taketani
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press
ISBN: 161168613X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
The Black Pacific Narrative: Geographic Imaginings of Race and Empire between the World Wars chronicles the profound shift in geographic imaginings that occurred in African American culture as the United States evolved into a bioceanic global power. The author examines the narrative of the Òblack PacificÓ_the literary and cultural production of African American narratives in the face of AmericaÕs efforts to internationalize the Pacific and to institute a ÒPacific Community,Ó reflecting a vision of a hemispheric regional order initiated and led by the United States. The black Pacific was imagined in counterpoint to this regional order in the making, which would ultimately be challenged by the Pacific War. The principal subjects of study include such literary and cultural figures as James Weldon Johnson, George S. Schuyler, artists of the black Federal Theatre Project, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walter White, all of whom afford significant points of entry to a critical understanding of the stakes of the black Pacific narrative. Adopting an approach that mixes the archival and the interpretive, the author seeks to recover the black Pacific produced by African American narratives, narratives that were significant enough in their time to warrant surveillance and suspicion, and hence are significant enough in our time to warrant scholarly attention and reappraisal. A compelling study that will appeal to a broad, international audience of students and scholars of American studies, African American studies, American literature, and imperialism and colonialism.
Author: Chris Suh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197631614
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
The Allure of Empire traces how American ideas about race in the Pacific were made and remade on the imperial stage before World War II. Following the Russo-Japanese War, the United States cultivated an amicable relationship with Japan based on the belief that it was a "progressive" empire akin to its own. Even as the two nations competed for influence in Asia and clashed over immigration issues in the American West, the mutual respect for empire sustained their transpacific cooperation until Pearl Harbor, when both sides disavowed their history of collaboration and cast each other as incompatible enemies. In recovering this lost history, Chris Suh reveals the surprising extent to which debates about Korea shaped the politics of interracial cooperation. American recognition of Japan as a suitable partner depended in part on a positive assessment of its colonial rule of Korea. It was not until news of Japan's violent suppression of Koreans soured this perception that the exclusion of Japanese immigrants became possible in the United States. Central to these shifts in opinion was the cooperation of various Asian elites aspiring to inclusion in a "progressive" American empire. By examining how Korean, Japanese, and other nonwhite groups appealed to the United States, this book demonstrates that the imperial order sustained itself through a particular form of interracial collaboration that did not disturb the existing racial hierarchy.
Author: Yuan Shu
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 988845577X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307
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Book Description
The field of transnational American studies is going through a paradigm shift from the transatlantic to the transpacific. This volume demonstrates a critical method of engaging the Asian Pacific: the chapters present alternative narratives that negotiate American dominance and exceptionalism by analyzing the experiences of Asians and Pacific Islanders from the vast region, including those from the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Hawaii, Guam, and other archipelagos. Contributors make use of materials from “oceanic archives,” retrieving what has seemingly been lost, forgotten, or downplayed inside and outside state-bound archives, state legal preoccupations, and state prioritized projects. The result is the recovery of indigenous epistemologies, which enables scholars to go beyond US-based sources and legitimates third-world knowledge production and dissemination. Surprising findings and unexpected perspectives abound in this work. Minnan traders from southern China are identified as the agents who connected the Indian Ocean with the Pacific, making the Manila Galleon trade in the sixteenth century the first completely global commercial enterprise. The Chamorro poetry of Guam gives a view of America from beyond its national borders and articulates the cultural pride of the Chamorro against US colonialism and imperialism. The continuing distortion of indigenous claims to the sovereignty of Hawaii is analyzed through a reading of the most widely circulated English translation of the creation myth, Kumulipo. There is also a critique of the Korean involvement in the American War in Vietnam, which was informed and shaped by Korean economy and politics in a global context. By investigating the transpacific as moments of military, cultural, and geopolitical contentions, this timely collection charts the reach and possibilities of the latest developments in the most dynamic form of transnational American studies. “This collection offers a well-organized and intellectually coherent series of essays addressing issues of American imperialism in Oceania and the Pacific region. Covering history, politics, and literary culture in equal measure, the essays are theoretically well-informed, and their focus on Indigenous cultures speaks to the current scholarly interest in the ways in which Indigenous communities can be understood within a global context.” —Paul Giles, University of Sydney “This terrific volume offers the latest mapping of that complex terrain known as the ‘transpacific.’ Timely and capacious, the essays here from an all-star cast of international scholars offer the latest thinking on the ‘oceanic’ dimensions of global modernity. Essential reading for anyone interested in the current ‘Asian’ turn in American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Transpacific Studies.” —Steven Yao, Hamilton College
Author: Tony Ballantyne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350264172
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
This book explores the emergence of 'Australasia' as a way of thinking about the culture and geography of this region. Although it is frequently understood to apply only to Australia and New Zealand, the concept has a longer and more complicated history. 'Australasia' emerged in the mid-18th century in both French and British writing as European empires extended their reach into Asia and the Pacific, and initially held strong links to the Asian continent. The book shows that interpretations and understandings of 'Australasia' shifted away from Asia in light of British imperial interests in the 19th century, and the concept was adapted by varying political agendas and cultural visions in order to reach into the Pacific or towards Antarctica. The Making and Remaking of Australasia offers a number of rich case studies which highlight how the idea itself was adapted and moulded by people and texts both in the southern hemisphere and the imperial metropole where a range of competing actors articulated divergent visions of this part of the British Empire. An important contribution to the cultural history of the British Empire, Australia, New Zealand and Pacific Studies, this collection shows how 'Australasia' has had multiple, often contrasting, meanings.
