Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossings ed. by Lon Kurashige

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossings ed. by Lon Kurashige Yuki Obayashi Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossings, edited by Lon Kurashige. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2017. Vii + 275 pp. $68.00 cloth. ISBN: 978-0-8248-5576-5. Since Yunte Huang's 2008 publication, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics, the transpacific has been used to redefine traditional area studies of Asian studies, Asian American studies, and American studies, as observed in Naoki Sakai and Hyon Joo Yoo's The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture and Society (2012) and in Janet Hoskins and Viet Thanh Nguyen's Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field (2014). In Pacific America: Histories of Transoceanic Crossing, editor Lon Kurashige rearranges the [End Page 120] Eurocentric world order through the transpacific historical scope as globalization, he claims, evokes a need to view the world differently, with fresh eyes. In this project, Kurashige argues that uneasiness and uncertainties through multiple conflicts between different races and cultures, which he calls "fear" (2), are witnessed in transpacific history. Therefore, Kurashige positions the transpacific as a space to question and articulate such discordances buried in the history. Pacific America consists of four parts: "China and Ocean Worlds," "Circuits and Diaspora," "Racism and Imperialism," and "Islands and the Pacific Rim." Part 1, "China and Ocean Worlds," introduces the pre- and early modern periods before the United States began colonial expansion into the Pacific in the late nineteenth century. John E. Wills Jr.'s chapter "A Very Long Early Modern? Asia and Its Oceans, 1000–1850," on Chinese trade in the Pacific beginning in the eleventh century, describes the historical continuity before multiple empires claimed the Pacific Islands as territories. In "Transatlantic and Transpacific Connections in Early American History," Kariann Akemi Yokota argues that Americans expressed freedom and independence through trading on the Pacific vis-à-vis the British prohibition of its colony's interactions with other countries. Part 2, "Circuits and Diaspora," introduces the interactions of the United States with various Asian Pacific countries—Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Vietnam—through trading, education, immigration, and politics. Madeline Y. Hsu's chapter, "Chinese and American Collaborations through Educational Exchange during the Era of Exclusion, 1872–1955," challenges previous notions regarding the Chinese Exclusion Act, which hindered Chinese from migrating to the United States. Hsu succinctly argues that the U.S. and Chinese governments collaborated to send Chinese to the United States for higher education during the exclusion era. These Chinese elites, who participated in the educational program, contributed to the notion of model minority later on. Part 3, "Racism and Imperialism," not only highlights the U.S. empire on the Pacific in the twentieth century but also expands the arguments to the Japanese empire, which decentralizes traditional Eurocentric imperial studies by introducing transpacific perspectives. Augusto Espiritu's "Inter-Imperial Relations, the Pacific, and Asian American History" and Eiichiro Azuma's "Japanese Immigrant Settler Colonialism and the Construction of a US National Security Regime against the Transborder 'Yellow Peril'" are interconnected in that both describe how Asian Americans took part in constructing the U.S. empire. Espiritu explains that Asian Americans whose homelands were targeted by Japanese colonial expansion supported the U.S. empire in opposition to Imperial Japan, what he calls "inter-imperial relations" (180). Beyond focusing on single ethnicity, Espiritu urges us to look at Asian Americans as a holistic entity to understand how the empires were contested on the Pacific, which [End Page 121] also suggests today's power struggle between the United States and China. Furthermore, Azuma observes that racism in California pushed Issei out to Mexico, but they ironically adapted U.S. settler colonialism to their new home. The Pacific Islands, which are often underrepresented in transpacific studies, are included in Pacific America to fill what Kurashige terms "a gaping hole in the middle" (10). The last part of the book, "Islands and the Pacific Rim," shows the editor's efforts to strike a fairer balance by including Hawaii, the Marshall Islands, and the Mariana Islands. While the chapters in Part 4, "Islands and the Pacific Rim," include diverse locations with insightful arguments, the topics are white American racial politics in the annexation of Hawaii...